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| Maj. Gen. Adnan Salou |
The highest-ranking officer to defect to the Syrian
opposition is a Syrian Kurd who was the country’s chemical warfare chief of
staff for five years.
Retired Maj. Gen. Adnan Nawras Salou has just been
tasked to head a single rebel military command based in Turkey.
Salou, a 1971 graduate of the Syrian Military Academy
in Homs who served in various armored divisions and the Special Forces, was promoted
to major general and named Syria’s chemical warfare chief of staff in 2003, a
position he held until his retirement in 2008.
He defected to Turkey in mid-June together with eight
other officers.
Salou believes the international community’s alarm over
reports that Syria has begun moving some of its massive chemical
stockpiles out of storage facilities for safekeeping in Iran or the good
hands of Lebanon’s Hezbollah is unwarranted. “The regime is incapable of doing
that,” the leading Saudi daily Asharq
Alawsat quotes
him as saying crisply.
Syria,
one of the few countries that never signed the 1992 Chemical Weapons
Convention, is believed to have, among other things, mustard gas, a Sarin nerve
agent, and even VX.
In
a video posted overnight on YouTube, Salou announced he would be heading “The
Joint Military Command of the Syrian Revolution,” which will include
representatives of all armed opposition groups as well as 18 brigadiers who
have defected so far.
The
announcement by the Kurdish major general is the second prod in five weeks to Syria’s Kurds (estimated
at about two million or 9% of the population) to throw their full weight behind
the uprising against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. The first prod
was last month’s election of another Syrian Kurd, Abdulbaset Sieda,
president of the opposition umbrella group known as the Syrian National Council
(SNC).
