Washington luring Turkey into Iran’s lap

Ailing Arabs caught between Iran (L) and Turkey (R)  -- by Syrian cartoonist Fahd Bahady

Turkish strategic affairs analyst Ali Hasan Bakir believes the precipitous rapprochement between Turkey, the region’s Sunni heavyweight, and Shiite powerhouse Iran could be aimed at giving “a Sunni cover to America’s nuclear deal with Iran.”

The nuclear agreement between the 5+1 world powers and Iran was reached in Geneva last Sunday.

Ankara-based Bakir tells today’s edition of the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat: “There has been frantic efforts of late by Iran and the United States to cajole Turkey by offering to iron out some of her regional hurdles.

“Iran, for instance, played a key role in pushing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to open up to Turkey.

“This, in addition to addressing some of Turkey’s foreign policy concerns such as reducing secular tensions in the area and fighting terror. That could pave the way for closer bilateral cooperation to take Ankara’s interests into consideration as regards Syria or at least cut its losses in case [Bashar al-] Assad stays in power for a short while.”

Bakir is of the opinion “Iran’s aim is to win over Turkey and isolate the Gulf Arab states at the regional level and secure a Sunni cover to America’s nuclear deal with Iran -- a deal that strongly exasperated Saudi Arabia…”

Enhanced cooperation between Turkey and Iran would improve regional stability, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on a visit to Tehran this week.

The countries’ foreign ministers demonstrated their growing unity Wednesday by jointly calling for a cease-fire in Syria ahead of peace talks between its civil war factions set for January 22 in Geneva.

Additionally, Davutoglu announced that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani would visit Turkey in January.

“It is true that we have some differences with neighboring countries, but the tenets of our foreign policy have not changed,” Davutoglu said at a press conference with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who will be visiting Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia shortly.

In Syria, Iran is supporting the Assad regime, while the Turkish government is backing the opposition.

Davutoglu said Tehran and Ankara need not wait two months for Geneva-2, but “before then, the ground should be paved for a cease-fire that will also contribute to the success of that conference.”

Rouhani said in a meeting with Davutoglu yesterday the Syria conflict “has no military solution, and the country’s crisis should be ended through serious negotiations.”

The Turkish foreign minister also called for greater energy cooperation between the two countries.

“At a place and time where some try to instigate sectarian conflicts, dialogue between Iran and Turkey is the most important dialogue in the region,” Davutoglu said.

Asharq Alawsat quotes unnamed Turkish sources as saying their country’s spymaster, Hakan Fidan, shapes Iran policy and “is not an enemy of Iran.”

Syrian Kurds declare transitional administration

The PYD's Saleh Muslim and a map showing "Rojava" along Syria's border with Turkay

Syrian Kurds yesterday declared an interim administration in northeastern parts of the country (Rojava), further solidifying their geographic and political presence after driving out radical Islamist rebels. 

Long oppressed under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Kurds view the Syria war as an opportunity to gain more autonomy -- like their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq. 

Control over Syria's northeast, where Kurds predominate, had in recent months swung back and forth between them and mainly Arab Islamist rebels, who strongly oppose what they suspect are Kurdish plans to secede.

But a Kurdish militia prevailed earlier this month, and at a meeting held in the Syrian city of Qamishli yesterday, a committee of Kurdish and other groups said it was now time to set up an administrative body to run the region. 

"In light of the current circumstances which Syria is going through, and in order to fill an administrative vacuum... we see it as an utmost necessity to reach a transitional, pluralistic, democratic administration," said a statement sent to Reuters.

The statement said they were committed to the unity of Syria and asked world powers and neighboring countries to back the new administration, which they said had won the support of different political groups and minorities in the area.

The dominant force on the ground in Syria's Kurdish areas is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has a well-trained militia and is affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The PYD's growing clout has also dismayed some fellow Kurds, who accuse it of being in league with Assad and seeking to replace his authoritarian one-party rule with its own.

PYD representative Mohammed Reso said some Syrian Kurdish parties had refused to sign up to the plan.

Davutoglu

In his first remarks after the declaration of the interim administration, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused the PYD of "not keeping its promise."

"We told them to avoid a de facto administration declaration that could divide Syria. We told them to put a distance between themselves and the [al-Assad] regime," Davutoglu said during a live interview on private broadcaster NTV on Tuesday. 

He criticized the Kurdish group for adopting an "ambivalent" posture. "The most serious mistake that the PYD is making is to put under pressure on the other Kurdish opposition groups in [their] controlled areas. We receive a lot of complaints from Kurds [in northern Syria], and we hope they will change this attitude," Davutoglu added.

PYD leader Saleh Muslim had visited Turkey twice in a brief period in July and August as the open conflict between Kurdish militia groups and jihadist rebels mounted, causing a refugee outflow from Rojava. He reportedly discussed with Turkish officials PYD's plans of forming an autonomous administration that triggered concerns in Ankara.

Barzani

The Turkish government and Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have adopted a similar attitude on the situation in northern Syria. Both oppose the PYD's creation of a politically autonomous entity in the region.

KRG leader Massoud Barzani is troubled by the disputes among Kurds, particularly between the PYD and other Kurdish parties, over the areas in Syria's north.

The Turkish government and Barzani also backed the Syrian Kurdish National Council (KNC), a group that agreed to join the main Syrian opposition body, the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.

“The KNC is close to Barzani. Barzani wanted to impose his policies in Rojava and Turkey wanted to use Barzani to establish an alternative group to the PYD, which was the KNC. They tried hard, but failed. The KNC is not stronger than the PYD,” Iso said.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to meet Barzani in Diyarbakir at the weekend.

According to Turkish media sources, Erdogan will visit Diyarbakir, a predominantly Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey on Saturday, when he will be meeting the Iraqi Kurdistan president.

A source from Turkish Channel Show TV said renowned Kurdish singer Shivan Perwer will be back to Diyarbakir from self-exile in Germany to meet Barzani and Erdogan.

Relations between Iraq’s Kurdistan Region and Turkey have been improving steadily of late.

The volume of trade between Iraq and Turkey is about $12 billion, with three quarters of it being between Ankara and the Kurdistan Region.

Iran

Writing for the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat today, former editor-in-chief Tariq Alhomayed quotes a Reuters dispatch yesterday as saying the Kurds’ military gains in Syria is posing a dilemma for regional powers.

Syrian Kurds view Syria’s civil war as an opportunity to gain the kind of autonomy enjoyed by their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq.

The seriousness of the report, says Alhomayed, is that their offensive has stirred mixed feelings, globally, regionally and locally, even among some fellow Kurds, who say the Kurdish fighters have drifted into an Iran-led regional axis supportive of Assad, something they deny.

To Assad and his Shiite allies, their gains mean more territory out of Sunni rebel hands two and a half years into a revolt against his rule.

Islamist rebels -- particularly the Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that have been imposing their will across rebel-held territory -- argue that their defeat says more about who was helping their foes than the strength of the Kurdish forces themselves. They said help from Assad's forces and Shiite-led Iraq was the reason for Kurdish gains.

The Iraqi government strongly denies supporting any faction in Syria, including Kurds.

A closer reading of this and other reports shows the Kurds’ military gains in Syria are posing a bigger dilemma for Syrian Kurds than for regional powers.

A senior Iraqi politician told Reuters Shiite powerhouse Iran, Assad's main regional ally, was also actively backing the PYD and emboldening the PKK, with which it is closely aligned.

"Iran supports these groups to guarantee having a powerful group in Syria in case things go out of control," he said, adding that Tehran was creating a network of allies from minority groups across the country to bolster their interests and to create alternative partners should Assad fall.

The Iraqi politician said Baghdad's Shiite government was supporting the Kurds to weaken cross-border ties among Sunnis.

"(They) may help them in cooperation with Iran to create an autonomous Kurdish region ... to establish a buffer zone between Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis."

This of course means the Kurds will have hostile and unbalanced relations with a predominantly Sunni region.

Also, can Syria’s Kurds genuinely withstand Turkey’s ire and eventually that of Tehran, which is home to eight million Iranian Kurds?

Syrian Kurds are set to realize that you don’t build nation-states by simply having minorities go their separate ways.

A cacophony of sound bites pounds Syria

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal yesterday called for Syrian rebels to be given anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to “level the playing field” in their fight to remove President Bashar al-Assad.

“I’m not in government so I don’t have to be diplomatic. I assume we’re sending weapons and if we were not sending weapons it would be a terrible mistake on our part,” he said in a televised debate at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Prince Turki, co-founder of the King Faisal Foundation and board chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, is the son of the late King Faisal and brother of the kingdom’s foreign minister. He studied at Princeton, Cambridge and Georgetown universities before serving in succession over the years as adviser to royal court, intelligence chief, ambassador to the UK and Ireland, and finally ambassador to the United States.

“You have to level the playing field. Most of the weapons the rebels have come from captured Syrian stocks and defectors bringing their weapons,” he said.

“What is needed are sophisticated, high-level weapons that can bring down planes, can take out tanks at a distance. This is not getting through.”

But Prince Turki said foreign powers should have enough information on the many rebel brigades to ensure weapons only reached non-extremist groups.

Extremists are flowing into Syria from North Africa, Europe and other regions to fight with opposition forces, he said.

“Stop the killing and you won’t have these terrorists, they won’t have any place to go in Syria,” the Saudi prince said. Their presence was predicted from day one in the event of a prolonged crisis. The answer is to channel funds to “the good guys” among the opposition.

"You can select the good guys and give them these means and build their credibility," he said. "Now they don't have the means, and the extremists have the means and are getting the prestige."

“Sixty thousand people have been killed already,” Prince Turki said. “Do we have to wait for double or triple that number to die before Assad leaves?”

Pressed on the thorny issue whether the opposition’s allies are sending weapons into Syria, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: “The Turkish people have helped the refugees with their humanitarian needs and also the Syrian people to defend themselves by the best means… The Syrian people know what we are doing, how we are helping.”

Panelists agreed there must be a political solution in Syria.

Syria has become a “proxy war” with different countries trying to defend or impose their own interests, said Ghassan Salamé, Dean of The Paris School of International Affairs. Any solution could take many years unless one of two things happens, he said. Either one side must prevail militarily, or a political solution must be imposed on the various players from outside. “I don’t see another way out of this,” he said.

“Europeans, Arabs, Chinese, Russians: we’re all committing a crime by watching people in Syria die,” Salamé said, warning the worst was yet to come if the battle for Damascus begins in earnest. That is likely to be devastating and send many thousands more refugees into Lebanon and Jordan.

Jordan’s Abdullah

Also speaking yesterday in Davos during a panel appearance with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned, “Anyone who says that Bashar’s regime has got weeks to live really doesn't know the reality on the ground."

“They still have capability. ... So (I expect) a strong showing for at least the first half of 2013,” he said.

Nonetheless, fears are growing Syria may implode as the protracted conflict gets nastier.

Any fragmentation of the country into small states would be “catastrophic and something that we would be reeling from for decades to come,” Abdullah said.

He also warned of the threat of foreign jihadist fighters now in Syria.

Al-Qaeda has been established there for the past year and is getting support “from certain quarters,” the king said.

“They are a force to contend with, so even if we got the best government into Damascus tomorrow, we have at least two or three years of securing our borders from them coming across and to clean them up,” he said.

Comparing the militant threat with that seen in Afghanistan, Abdullah said: "The new Taliban we are going to have to deal with will be in Syria.”

Abdullah appealed for greater international help for more than 300,000 Syrian refugees who have already fled over the border into Jordan and are suffering in the grip of a cruel winter.

He also urged the stockpiling of humanitarian supplies that could be taken across Syria's borders, to try to keep people from leaving -- and to win hearts and minds.

“If these people start to starve and they don't have fuel and electricity and water, and hospitals are not running, that's when radicalization comes in and take advantage,” the king said.

Henry Kissinger

Richard Nixon, Hafez Assad and Henry Kissinger (syrianhistory.com)

Also touching on Syria in his wide-ranging address to business leaders at the Forum in Davos earlier on Thursday was the Nixon Administration’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who brokered the Syria-Israel disengagement agreement with Bashar’s father Hafez Assad in March 1974.

Kissinger called on Washington and Moscow to work together to solve the Syria crisis.

He counseled “an American-Russian understanding as a first step towards defining what the objective is,” adding: “The Syrian problem would best be dealt with internationally by Russia and America not making it a contest of national interest.”

The Syrian conflict, initially seen as a fight of democracy against dictatorship, has transformed into a conflict between various ethnic groups, leaving the international community with a dilemma. “The outside world finds that if it intervenes militarily, it will be in the middle of a vast ethnic conflict; and if it doesn’t intervene militarily, it will be caught in a humanitarian tragedy,” said Kissinger.

While a number of outcomes are possible –- Assad staying in office, a total “Sunnite” victory, or an emergence of a loose federation of various ethnic groups –- what is clear is that “the more the outside world competes, the worse it gets,” he said.

John Kerry

John Kerry, the incoming secretary of state who met several times over the years with Bashar, did not mention Syria in his opening statement at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday.

But when pressed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about getting more directly involved in helping the Syrian rebels, Kerry said he needs time to understand the situation better.

McCain, part of a bipartisan group of senators which just got back from a trip to the Middle East and visited Syrian refugees camps, told Kerry they feel “an anger and frustration” and believe the United States is indifferent to their suffering.

One Syrian teacher told McCain and the other senators, “This next generation of children will take revenge on those that did not help them.”

McCain added, “We are sowing the wind in Syria and we are going to reap the whirlwind.”

He said, “We can do a lot more, without putting boots on the ground” – such as a no-fly zone – and he complained that “all I get, frankly, from the (Obama) administration is the fall of Assad is, quote, ‘inevitable.’ I agree, but what about what happens in the meantime?”

Another member of the delegation that toured the Middle East, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., complained to Kerry that U.S. humanitarian aid intended for Syrian refugees “has not reached the people on the ground.”

Kerry and McCain at the confirmation hearing

In response to both Coons and McCain, Kerry said “if you have a complete implosion of the state” in Syria after Assad’s fall, it would greatly increase the risk that Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal would fall into the wrong hands.

Asked about the personal bond he once had with Assad, Kerry said there was a moment where Syria reached out to the West but that the moment has long passed.

“Sometimes there are moments where you may be able to get something done in foreign policy, and if the moment somehow doesn’t ripen correctly or get seized, you miss major opportunities,” he said.

"History caught up to us. That never happened. And it's now moot, because he (Assad) has made a set of judgments that are inexcusable, that are reprehensible, and I think is not long for remaining as the head of state in Syria," the senator said. "I think the time is ticking."

Kerry also said: “We need to change Bashar Assad’s calculation. Right now President Assad doesn’t think he’s losing -- and the opposition thinks it is winning.”

Kerry said the goal of U.S. policy is a peaceful transition to a new government.

He said he hoped to confer with the Russians and with others and “increase the readiness of President Assad to see that the die is cast, the handwriting is on the wall….”

“I don’t want inquisitiveness or curiosity about what possibilities might exist with the Russians to be translated into optimism. I don’t have optimism. I have hope,” the senator said.

Coons told Kerry, “We frankly face a very narrow window to make a difference on the ground in support of the opposition.”  

“I get it,” Kerry answered, but he said he was worried about who would control the country if Assad were forced out of power.

Laurent Fabius

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in his annual New Year's address to the press there was no sign the Syria war was going to end anytime soon, in contrast to his prediction last month that the end was near for Assad.

"Things are not moving. The solution we had hoped for, and by that I mean the fall of Bashar and the arrival of the [opposition’s National] Coalition to power, has not happened," he said.

France was the first to recognize the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

Fabius told RFI radio in December "the end is nearing" for Assad. On Thursday, he said international mediation and discussions about the crisis were not getting anywhere.

"There are no recent positive signs," he said.

He said National Coalition leaders and representatives of some 50 nations and organizations would meet in Paris on Monday to discuss how to fulfill previous commitments. He did not elaborate.

Aleppo battle to decide the fate of Damascus

Turkish military reinforcements heading to the border with Syria yesterday

Current fighting over control of Syria’s commercial hub, Aleppo, would determine the fate of the country’s political capital, Damascus, according to veteran Syrian writer and journalist Ghassan al-Imam.

The new strategy of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, he writes in his weekly column this morning for the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, “focuses on keeping control of Aleppo and Damascus only and on thinning out regime forces across Syria after their failed counter-offensive to recover ‘liberated’ rural areas in the north, east and south.”

The man behind the new strategy “is believed to be Assad’s newly appointed army chief of staff, Gen. Ali Ayyub.” His idea is to deploy the bulk of elite military forces “in and around Damascus and Aleppo, allowing the regime to keep claiming for as long as possible that it controls the country’s political and economic capitals.”

To tighten their grip on Damascus and Aleppo, the armed forces need to secure the 400-kilometer long highway that links them, including the Homs-Hama junction. This has proven difficult, despite the “ethnic cleansing” campaigns against adjacent Sunnite villages in the al-Ghab plain, writes Imam.

Regime forces have regained full control of most Damascus suburbs recently held by the insurgents, including Barzeh, Qaboun, Jubah, Harasta, Douma and much of Midan…

The political capital “has thus overcome shortages in basic supplies. There’s no big rush on bakeries and gas stations anymore. Large numbers of the Damascus bourgeoisie have relocated to Lebanon, preceded by the flight (to Beirut) of their savings and capital assets. Alawite families have for their part relocated to either their “settlements” on the outskirts of Damascus or their mountain strongholds.”

In keeping with the regime’s new military strategy, Aleppo is next, says Imam.

“The rebels’ morale in Aleppo is high, despite their shortages in weapons and ammunitions supplies. The number of armed insurgents is between 3,000 and 5,000.  Their ranks are expected to grow to 10,000 fighters in case the battle drags out for weeks.

“The battle effectively started last Saturday after a week of shelling and attacks by helicopter gunships. But the army’s first attempt to storm Salheddin (one of the areas of Aleppo where fighters from the Free Syrian Aram are entrenched) failed.”

In essence, Ghassan al-Imam continues, “that’s the situation on the ground. Politically, I would just say the battle for Aleppo would determine the fate of Damascus… And if, God forbid, regime forces were to regain Aleppo, I would lay the blame on Turkey, which is overseeing the battle from outside the border.”

Turkey encouraged and thrust into the city an inadequate number of poorly armed rebel fighters, expecting them to hold their ground for weeks in a besieged city, Imam concludes.

Separately, Turkey Monday sent a convoy of tanks, ground-to-air missile batteries and other weapons to the border with Syria to further bolster its forces.

The new buildup came as the state-run Syrian daily al-Watan claimed Iran warned Turkey of a harsh response if it intervened militarily in Syria.

"Any attack on Syrian territory will encounter a harsh response, and the Iranian-Syrian mutual defense agreement will be activated," it reported yesterday.

“Turkey has agreed with the United States on a military intervention limited to the north of Syria, specifically the northern province of Aleppo, to pave the way for the creation of a safe haven guarded by the armed gangs,” the newspaper said.

"Turkey has received very strong warnings in the past few hours and the following message: beware changing the rules of the game," al-Watan added.

In a phone call yesterday, U.S. President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to help the growing numbers of refugees - both inside Syria and in neighboring countries.

Speaking to a group of reporters on Sunday night, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey might need to take more drastic measures if the regime onslaught on Aleppo triggered a huge flight of refugees to Turkey. “We may have to find a way to host these refugees within Syria,” he said, signaling Turkey may be forced to set up a buffer zone on Syrian soil to address the mounting refugee crisis.

Although he declined to give a specific number of refugees that would prompt Turkey to take such action, Davutoglu asked simply, “What would happen if the refugee number reached 100,000?”

Turkey already hosts half as many Syrian refugees in various centers.

Turkey frets about Syria’s PKK game

Ocalan portrait at pro-Assad rally outside Syria's Beirut embassy (Photo from firstpost.com) 

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu says Ankara won’t allow Syria to use the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) against his country.

“Turkish security forces are monitoring a number of PKK groups entering Turkey from Syria. Turkey would not allow any country to undermine its security,” Davutoglu said on his way to Nakhchivan City, capital of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, after talks with his Dutch counterpart, Uri Rosenthal, in Rotterdam on Wednesday.

A think piece by Oytun Orhan, published last month in the Turkish daily Today's Zaman, says the first signal of cooperation between Syria and the PKK emerged from a recent news analysis by Firat News Agency, which is close to the PKK. The analysis said Turkey's ill-advised policies led Syria and Iran to give anti-Turkish forces "freedom of movement" against Ankara.

When Syrian-Kurd hero and opposition figure Meshaal Tammo was assassinated in Qamihsli last October 7, Firat News Agency described him as "a Kurdish member of the Syrian National Council (SNC) formed in Istanbul and supported by the Western powers and Turkey.”

The PKK's sidekick in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), always refers to Syrian-Kurd representatives in the SNC as "collaborators."

PYD leader Saleh Muhammad was meantime allowed back to Syria from exile and co-opted to become deputy chairman of the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which supports reform in Syria but does not advocate dismantlement of the Syrian dictatorship and the removal of Bashar al-Assad as president.

Another signal of the Syria-PKK rapprochement came from the Lebanese capital within weeks of Tammo's assassination. PKK flags and posters of Abdullah Ocalan were unfurled during a pro-Assad demonstration organized in front of the Syrian embassy in Beirut on October 31.

In November, Syria allowed the PKK to set up a camp for 150 of its men a short distance away from Sanliurfa in southeast Turkey. The commander of the new PKK camp is believed to be Fehman Huseyin of Syria, who goes by the codename Bahoz Erdal and masterminded PKK attacks in Turkey, including the Çukurca outrage last October, when 26 Turkish soldiers were killed.

UN-Turkish humanitarian corridors to Syria war

Davutoglu and Clinton (State Department image)

The next palliative to the Syrian crisis is likely to be a three-month old French prescription mandated by the UN and administered by Turkey: humanitarian corridors to the Syria war.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu reveals as much in remarks to Milliyet, the major Turkish daily newspaper founded in 1950, after his extensive talks in Washington this week with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.  

Ankara, he tells Milliyet, is set on a two-pronged approach to the situation in Syria – one political, the other humanitarian.

“We tried everything in the nine months of our negotiations with the Syrian regime,” Davutoglu said, adding:

“In the end, we supported the Arab initiative. But Syria detached itself from its people and the Arab world. The prevailing universal impression is that the regime is relying on Russian, Chinese and Iran’s backing.

“We’re now working in tandem with the Arab League on two tracks. On the political track, we aim (presumably through the planned “Friends of Syria” coalition) to raise world public awareness and create an international consensus. On the other track, we want to work with the United Nations on a mechanism to deliver humanitarian aid to Syrian cities, particularly Homs and Hama.”

He also told Milliyet, “We are thinking of delivering the humanitarian assistance to the said cities through humanitarian corridors.”

Davutoglu’s words echo his remarks after meeting with Clinton at the State Department on Monday, when he told a joint press briefing:

“We went through the situation in Syria. First, we agreed there should be a new humanitarian initiative to reach out to people who are suffering because of shortages of food and medicine everywhere in Syria. And therefore, I spoke with the UN Secretary-General yesterday, and we started, as Turkey, an initiative with the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, (on ways) to make this humanitarian access possible.

“Secondly, of course the political dimension. We (the United States and Turkey) will be together in Tunisia, and the meeting in Tunisia (of the “Friends of Syria”) will be an important international platform to show solidarity with the Syrian people, and to send a strong and clear message to the Syrian regime, that they cannot continue these violent policies…”

Clinton herself told Monday’s briefing, “We will work closely with Turkey and other partners to address the growing humanitarian concerns of those who are suffering. We have heard the call of the Syrian people for help and we are committed to working to allow the entry of medical supplies, of emergency help to reach those who are wounded and dying. We are increasing our funding to organizations like the Red Crescent, the International Committee for the Red Cross, and we’re working directly with Syrian organizations at the grassroots to help families who have no electricity, food, or clean water.

“And because of the process leading toward Tunisia, we will work closely with Turkey and others to promote a political process.“

The frontier between Turkey's Hatay province and Syria offers the probable site for the "humanitarian corridors" first proposed by France last November. Hatay is hosting all five camps for refugees who crossed over from Syria.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe outlined the proposal for technically and politically challenging humanitarian corridors to Syria in late November, saying they could be carved out either with or without the approval of Assad’s regime.

At the time, Juppe ruled out military intervention, but when asked whether humanitarian convoys would need military protection he said: "Of course ... by international observers, but there is no question of a military intervention in Syria.”

"For us, there is no possible humanitarian aid without an international mandate," Juppe said.

Humanitarian corridors to Syria and the February 24 “Friends of Syria” conference in Tunisia would fulfill two provisions of last Sunday’s Arab League resolution on the Syrian crisis.

A third provision urging the UN Security Council to pass a resolution setting up a joint Arab-UN peacekeeping force for Syria is on its deathbed. Both the United States and Russia concur the peacekeeping request “will take agreement and consensus” since “there is no peace to keep in Syria” as yet.