International Crisis Group
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Syrian Paradox: The Regime Gets Stronger, Even as It Loses Its Grip | TIME
By Tony Karon
News reports typically characterize the Syrian rebellion as being 16 or 17 months old. It is one of those descriptions delivered en passant while relating the news of the day: the battle for Aleppo grinds on into its sixth day threatening a massive humanitarian crisis; new video shows rebels executing unarmed prisoners; President Bashar Assad urges his troops on through written messages but declines to make public appearances, and so on. But the International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected organization of analysts, mediators and former diplomats, on Wednesday issued a report urging opponents of the Assad regime, both Syrian and international, to pay closer attention to the implications of that 17-month time span.
Photo: Syria Freedom/Flickr
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Syria: Urban Fronts | Financial Times
By Michael Peel and Roula Khalaf
A volley of gunfire shattered the early evening calm in Salhiya Street, bringing a posse of men armed with metal bars, plastic chairs and other improvised weapons dashing to the busy thoroughfare in the heart of Damascus.
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Financial Times: Syrian opposition wary of jihadist push
“Jihad is the only way to avenge the killing of our brothers,” says the narrator as the camera zooms in on roadside bombs taking out Syrian security vehicles.
FULL ARTICLE (Financial Times)
Photo: FSA member on patrol in Idlib, FreedomHouse/Flickr
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WASHINGTON – On the one-year anniversary of the uprisings in Syria, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the armed resistance is not able to mount a credible military threat to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, senior U.S. intelligence officials told The Huffington Post.
The powerful, Russian-armed Syrian army remains firmly in control behind the Assad regime, senior intelligence officials say.
That assessment underlies the Obama administration’s reluctance to become more actively involved in the uprising against Assad that began on March 15, 2011. After a year of sporadic and inconclusive violence against the regime, the White House has flatly ruled out providing arms to the opposition and instead is focusing on coordinating international pressure against the Assad regime and providing humanitarian relief.
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Even though the Assad regime has fended off the challenge so far, its long-term future is in doubt, some critics say. In a recent assessment, the International Crisis Group, an independent think tank, wrote that Assad’s days are numbered.
The regime “continues to enjoy substantial military superiority over the opposition,” the International Crisis Group reported. “Its conduct on the ground – including excessive use of force by regular troops … horrendous treatment of detainees and indiscriminate punishment of entire swathes of the population – precludes even a semblance of normalization.”
Given enough time, the International Crisis Group said, “the regime might be able to destroy the urban and social fabric of entire neighbourhoods, as it appears to have done in parts of Homs. But that will only reinvigorate protests and armed resistance elsewhere.”
FULL ARTICLE (The Huffington Post)
Photo: FreedomHouse/Flickr
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RAY SUAREZ: In the meantime, with the world debating the way forward in Syria, people there are using testimonial Web videos to get their stories out.
One of the best known, Danny Abdul Dayem, has documented the daily horrors of life in Homs for months.
And Danny Abdul Dayem joins us now. He slipped out of Homs and is currently travelling in the U.S., raising awareness about the situation in Syria. He joins us from Houston, where he’s meeting with a group of Syrian-Americans later tonight. And Robert Malley’s with me in Washington. He worked in the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and is now program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group.
Danny Abdul Dayem, let me start with you. You have been in Syria quite recently. The army moved on Homs, especially neighborhood of Baba Amr, which you’re very familiar with. What’s the latest that you’re hearing from your hometown?
DANNY ABDUL DAYEM, Syrian activist: The latest I’m hearing is the Free Syrian Army left Baba Amr because they were bombarding the whole area randomly.
So, the Syrian army, the Assad regime’s army has entered in Baba Amr and they’re executing any guy they find. They have already executed more than 30 guys there. They have taken over all the kids. Anyone over 14 years old has been imprisoned and tortured. They’re stealing all the houses, stealing all the shops and burning down everything they find in that area.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, there’s a hot debate in the United States and in the rest of the world about what happens next. What would you like to see and what would the people of Homs like to see happen next? What kind of aid from the rest of the world?
DANNY ABDUL DAYEM: Well, what we would like to see is an intervention, an army intervention, a strike on Assad’s regime and a no-fly zone. We don’t need aid and humanitarian.
People are being killed there. We need support for the Free Syrian Army. This is what we have been asking for, for a long time. But what I am 100 percent sure is, no one’s going to do anything about this, and the Assad regime will hit us harder and harder with its air force.
What we are asking for is either say you’re going to help us or you’re not. Stop leaving us in the middle, dying like this. That’s not what our path is. That is not what’s going to happen to us.
RAY SUAREZ: Robert Malley, you’re watching the same situation that Danny is. Is what he’s suggesting going to work?
ROBERT MALLEY, International Crisis Group: Well, he’s watching it. He watches it much – up closer than I have and that I ever will.
And obviously what we’re hearing is very moving. I think he put the question very well. Is there going to be real intervention, in other words, the kind of intervention that Sen. McCain spoke about and others spoke about, or not? Because the half-measures, arming the opposition, having a safe quarter or safe haven, those are really not going to change anything.
And so the real question is, are we at a position now where we could intervene massively, taking out the air defenses to create a no-fly zone? According to military experts, that’s weeks and weeks and weeks of constant sorties, with all the repercussions you could imagine in a country like Syria with civilian casualties because one of the way in which their air defenses, one of the most robust air defenses in the region, are intermingled with civilians, and what it would mean in terms of how Syria might react with the neighbors it has in Jordan and Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.
That’s why the president said what he said. This is an extraordinarily difficult enterprise.
And we couldn’t do it…
Photo: FreedomHouse/Flickr
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Reuters: Doubts over Syria rebel army after escalation threat
By Dominic Evans
Threats by Syrian armed insurgents to step up attacks on security forces, just days after their leader announced a truce that was largely ignored, have reinforced doubts over the control top officers exert over rebel fighters on the ground.
Colonel Riad al-Asaad, head of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), pledged this week to escalate operations in response to what he said was the unsatisfactory performance of Arab League monitors in halting President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on protests.
The warning came just days after he said he had ordered a halt to operations against security forces while the monitors carry out their work - an order apparently disregarded by rebels who killed at least nine soldiers in three attacks.
Based across Syria’s northern border in Turkey, Asaad has been described by some observers as more of a figurehead than leader of the Free Syrian Army, which says it has over 15,000 military defectors in its ranks but whose true size, membership and capabilities remain cloaked in mystery.
“I’m not sure how much control the FSA has over militants in Syria,” said London-based analyst Julien Barnes-Dacey. “Most of these groups are operating on localized autonomous basis.”
Attacks by the rebel army have already begun to overshadow 10 months of largely peaceful protests. Authorities have seized on them as proof that Syria faces armed Islamist fighters backed by foreign powers.
Since November rebel fighters have ambushed military convoys, attacked an airbase, seized army checkpoints and launched symbolic attacks on an intelligence centre and an office of the ruling Baath Party in the heart of Damascus.
On Tuesday Asaad said the rebel army would “take a decision which will surprise the regime and the whole world” within days. “What is most likely now is we will start a huge escalation of our operations,” he said.
FEARS OF CIVIL WAR
The scale of the FSA attacks has already raised fears that the country could be slipping towards civil war.
Burhan Ghalioun, head of the main opposition Syrian National Council has urged army defectors and insurgents to limit their operations to defending peaceful protests, saying it was “fundamental for the success of our revolution to preserve its peaceful character.”
That tension between the armed and political wings of the uprising is matched by the gulf between an opposition in exile rallying international support and the protesters and rebels inside Syria who act largely independently, analysts say.
“I don’t think the Syrian National Council has much leverage over the Free Syrian Army, and I don’t think the Free Syrian Army has much leverage itself over what is happening on the ground,” said Peter Harling, an analyst with the International Crisis Group who has spent several years in Damascus.
He said the FSA was more of an umbrella for disparate fighters than a real centre of command.
“People see a source of legitimacy in this (FSA) label, but what you have is groups emerging on a very local level, mostly composed of civilians, joined by defectors. But it’s local dynamics rather than national.”
