Looking for winners in Syria

Cynic says John Kerry is telling Moaz al-Khatib: "We'll supply the FSA with 1.5kg NIDO milk cans"

Forget scenes of Syrians scattered in neighboring countries and waiting for blankets and canned food.

Overlook images of internally displaced Syrians being hunted down by shells hitting their breadlines or missiles and barrel bombs burying them in basements or caves.

Disregard pictures of brutal practices by regime forces and of some grim operations by nonnative fighters.

In his weekly think-piece today, the editor-in-chief of pan-Arab al-Hayat Ghassan Charbel says, “Forget all that and focus on a simple question: Who is winning in Syria?”

Charbel answers his own question as follows:

Syria-watchers recognize the Syrian regime put up fierce and exceptional resistance to rebel efforts to dislodge it either by peaceful or military means.

Unsurprisingly, that’s unlike the other regimes that were swept away by the so-called Arab Spring. The reason is that the Syrian regime has been building a political party and a military and security machine for the past 40 years. And unlike the regimes outwitted by the Arab Spring, [Alawite] people fanatical about their faith back the Syrian regime.

It is equally argued that defections got nowhere near the backbone of the regime’s military and security machine. But instead of the machine maintaining a tight grip on every span of Syrian territory, it is now sitting back in parts of it.

And the military and security machine’s capacity to pulverize the areas outside its control in no way proves its aptitude to win them back.

The Syrian army seriously ruined its credibility after using its arsenal internally and exposing its unending reliance on Iranian and Russian supply lines to continue fighting.

The army’s success in recapturing a township or a bypass is far from being a serious accomplishment. And nothing points to the Syrian army’s propensity to win the war and turn back the hands of time.

Examining the Baath Party status does not require due diligence and analysis. The party that monopolized the leadership of the state and society is dead.

It was buried when the regime announced its own reform measures. And Syria’s Baath can’t even emulate its counterpart in Iraq, which can at least claim to have been brought down by foreign intervention.

The opposition can say it made massive sacrifices and noticeable advances on the ground, except that a decisive win remains beyond its reach.

Also, the successes of Jabhat al-Nusra may yet prove taxing. One of the army’s first tasks in a changed Syria – if there is one – will be to write off the successes of al-Nusra and of the other roving fighters.

Much is said about Russia recouping its clout and imposing itself as the compulsory doorway to a solution. But despite Russia’s role in and outside the UN Security Council, Iran remains the Number One player in Syria. Moreover, it is impossible for any solution in Syria to uphold Moscow’s status ante the outbreak of the Syrian revolution.

Much is also written about Iran preventing the Syrian regime’s fall and about the lack of a solution without Tehran’s approval. But here again, Iran won’t possibly be comfortable in a post-solution Syria as it is with the current regime. The implication is that Iran is now on a damage limitation mission.

And since Iran’s backing of the Syrian regime effectively stoked the fire of a Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region, you can safely say Iran is not winning.

Despite the differences, the same can be said of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The party can help prevent or delay the regime’s fall, but only at a very high cost for Lebanon, which lately joined the Sunni-Shiite fray in Syria. Part of the very high cost will also be borne by Hezbollah proper in terms of its sect’s relations with Lebanon and Syria’s Sunni communities.

Ditto for Iraq in light of the [pro-Syrian regime] stance taken by the Nouri al-Maliki government.

America too can’t claim to be winning in Syria.

The Syrian tragedy exposed the shortcomings of America’s role under Barack Obama. It exposed Obama’s America as being tired, enfeebled and hesitant, though justifiably shunning reckless policies.

You can say we are in the midst of a regional civil war -- a protracted and destructive conflict. That’s why the talk about limited, sketchy and uncertain gains.

Chances of negotiations are extremely low. Changing the power balance would require a torrent of military aid and rivers of blood.

The sure thing is that the Syria we knew two years ago is forever gone.

Syria’s Sharaa: Now you see him. Now you don’t

Missing: Farouk al-Sharaa (left) and Abdullah al-Ahmar

Syrian armed forces deployed near the borders with Jordan and Turkey have reportedly been put on high alert.

The $64,000 question is whether the measure is meant to block or slow the torrent of Syrian refugees flooding the two countries or seal escape routes for defectors, chiefly Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in remarks published today his country cannot handle more than 100,000 Syrian refugees and instead proposes a UN buffer zone inside Syria to shelter them.

“If the number of refugees increases to 100,000, we will not be able to shelter them in Turkey. We have to welcome them in Syrian territory” under UN auspices, Davutoglu told the Turkish daily Hurriyet.

Davutoglu urged the UN to set up refugee camps “within the borders of Syria” in order to contain the number of Syrians fleeing their country.

The exodus of refugees to Turkey has intensified in the past week as a result of the battle for Aleppo, reaching a total of 70,000.

Jordan’s government spokesman has meanwhile sternly criticized Damascus for artillery shelling on its northern border that wounded a Jordanian girl and panicked other civilians.

Sameeh Ma’aytah says the government summoned the Syrian ambassador in Amman to hand him a letter of protest late yesterday. Amman is awaiting a formal response from Syria.

Four shells landed in Jordan on Sunday during clashes between the Syrian military and rebel forces on the Syrian side of the border.

Ma’aytah said Jordan protests what took place and “will ensure this does not happen again.”

Last month, Syrian troops killed a six-year-old Syrian boy fleeing to Jordan.

From April to August, the number of Syrians registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq nearly quadrupled, from 40,000 to more than 155,000. About 75 percent are believed to be women and children.

Community-based organizations say there are many more Syrians who have not registered, either because they are afraid, they are far from the registration centers, or they do not see any benefit to doing so.

The numbers have been a point of contention. The Jordanian government, for example, says 150,000 Syrians are on its territory, but observers question whether they are all refugees or if some are simply migrants or businessmen who regularly cross the border. In Lebanon, observers say the opposite, that the Beirut government is downplaying the numbers to avoid upsetting the unstable political balance in the country.

Syrians are increasingly seeking refuge beyond the region. Sources close to the Algerian Ministry of Interior have estimated that 12,000 Syrians have entered the country, with other estimates as high as 25,000.

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, reported that an average of 1,000 Syrian asylum seekers have arrived in Europe per month so far this year.

Barak, Clinton & Sharaa (syrianhistory.com photos)

Meanwhile, I suspect Sharaa, the Syrian vice president, has effectively jumped ship and is now holed up in a bordertown. I hear he is in the safe hands of members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) who are trying to secure his safe exit to a neighboring country.

Sharaa exiting Syria via Iraq or Lebanon would be foolhardy as both countries’ governments are allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and under Iran’s thumb. His escape through the occupied Golan being implausible leaves Jordan and Turkey as his two viable options.

The intense media focus on Sharaa can be explained by the fact he is the highest-ranking Sunnite Muslim figure in Assad’s minority Alawite-led regime.

He has been vice president since February 2006 and previously served as foreign minister for some 21 years both under the current Assad and his father Hafez.

He was Syria’s chief peace negotiator with Israel’s Ehud Barak at December1999 and January 2000 talks brokered by then U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Sharaa was last seen in public last month for the state funeral of leading regime security chiefs killed in a July 18 bomb attack in Damascus.

His elevation to the vice presidency followed the June 2005 resignation of veteran incumbent Abdul Halim Khaddam, who broke with the regime soon afterwards and went into self-exile in France.

Sharaa was born in December 1938 and hails from Deraa, the cradle of the uprising,

A married father of two, he served on the ruling Baath Party’s central committee for decades.

Ahmar (left) with Hafez and Bashar Assad (1994). Inset, at Hafez's 1971 inauguration (syrianhistory.com photos) 

Interestingly, opposition activists are claiming that Abdullah al-Ahmar, who heads the regional (pan-Arab) command of the Baath Party and is the highest ranked Baathist in Syria has been placed under house arrest after trying unsuccessfully to defect but this has not been confirmed.

Like Sharaa, Ahmar is a Sunnite Muslim. Born in 1936 at al-Tal, near Damascus, he was elected with Hafez Assad to the Baath Party regional command in 1970.

The West’s three big lies about Syria

This think piece, appearing today in the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, was penned in Arabic by Michel Kilo, a Syrian Christian considered a leading light of the Syrian opposition

Michel Kilo

The West’s politicians and experts parrot three big lies each time they get to talk about Syria. They lie to justify their passive role in Syria’s crisis. They trump up three Syrian “obstacles” that are difficult to surmount.

One

Their first lie is that Syrian society is a jumble of disparate sects and ethnic groups. It is as through the blend is new and did not exist throughout half a century of Baathist rule and a lot earlier.

They overlook the fact that Syria has always been a land of diversity and coexistence, bringing together different sects, religions, civilizations and ethnic groups.

It always welcomed strangers who gradually integrated its social fabric.

For example, the Kilo family to which I belong includes both Muslim and Christian residents of Latakia. And we call Muslim Kilos “cousins” they refer to us as cousins as well. We are united for better or worse and in the good days and bad days.

If you asked a Muslim or Christian Kilo about someone with the same surname, the answer is invariably, “He/she is a cousin.”

We hail from the Kurds Mountain area, which the regime has been shelling for the past month and a half. Although there are no Kurds left there, if you asked any other Syrian there about their place of residence, they would say: “The Kurds Mountain, east of Latakia.” That’s an area where Sunnite Muslims live in peace side by side with Alawites and Christians from all denominations.

My late father, God bless his soul, used to recount the story of a place of worship in the township of Kanasba that was falling apart until Muslims and Christians got together and decided to restore it. It still stands today. The Muslims call it the temple of Prophet Yahya and the Christians call it the temple of Yuhanna (John the Baptist).

Sects were not born under the Baath. It is Baath policies that bred sectarianism. That’s one of the problems afflicting our country today. The allegedly secular Baath Party deliberately reared sectarianism in state institutions to turn any quest for freedom by Syrians into a violent sectarian struggle.

Instead of noting this and recognizing that current sectarian manifestations amongst Syrians will evaporate once the regime is brought down, Western politicians and analysts insist on characterizing diversity in Syrian society as an insurmountable handicap.

Two

Their second fabrication is that the Syrian army is mighty, well trained and disciplined, and has in its arsenal modern and plentiful air defense systems as well as mass destruction weapons at sites dispersed across the country.

When blitzed by the United States, Iraq had no less than 625 air-to-surface missile bases, none of which brought down a single U.S. warplane. The United States was adamant that Saddam’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the world’s fourth largest army.

The West today is inflating the size, hardware and muscle of the Syrian army to steer clear of attacking the Syrian regime.

While I am not urging military intervention in Syria, I am persuaded such intervention was not ruled out because of the Syrian army’s might. Decision-makers on the matter of military intervention simply want the regime to continue pulverizing Syrian cities, towns and villages. Once the destruction is complete, they would start saying the Syrian army is weak, badly trained and equipped and we can put boots on the ground to kick out Assad.

Three

Their third lie is that the opposition is divided and impossible to unify. Except that when the Syrian National Council (SNC) was founded, the West was saying the Syrian opposition has sufficiently pulled together as to give national cover for external military intervention.

When the SNC urged Western powers to intervene, they backed off claiming the Syrian army was tough, the opposition fragmented and so was the whole of Syrian society.

Once Syrian opposition groups got together (at Arab League headquarters in early July) and thrashed out a detailed and all-inclusive roadmap to a new democratic, free, pluralistic and civilian Syria, the Western powers concocted a new lie about al-Qaeda having infiltrated the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

They fail to remember that they recently paved all al-Qaeda’s way from Benghazi to Tripoli. They turn a blind eye to the fact that the tens of thousands of people who have taken up arms against the regime are ordinary Syrians who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

Gentlemen, be honest. Had your interests warranted your intervention you would have said Syria’s is whole in its diversity, its army is crippled and its revolution is untouched by al-Qaeda.

“The Syria we know is dead”

Joret al-Sheyyah, Homs

The added value of this brilliant think piece, which I paraphrased from Arabic, is that its author is Ibrahim al-Amin, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Beirut daily al-Akhbar, which is close to Syria and Hezbollah

So far, the Arabs’ enemies have succeeded in pummeling Syria.

The regime’s durability does not at all mean survival of the state.

The Syrian army today is the regime’s cornerstone. But the Baath Party, civil institutions and public supporters are all now engaged in parochial power struggles.

The historical clout of Syrian state authority has been severely undermined. Security services risk becoming sluggish and passé. Blood that is being shed day after day deepens the schism. The result: a sharp dip in stability, a steeper economic slump and an even more acute drop in the yearning for the state.

This is at the upper layer.

At the base, collective recourse to self-management instruments benefits opposition forces, chiefly the armed groups that are sinking roots where the state switched off, the army evaporated and the loyalists decamped.

Syria’s rural areas were the uprising’s backbone before becoming the bedrock of its militarization. They now serve as the armed rebels’ action and planning centers.

These rural areas had uplifted the Baath revolution decades ago. The late Hafez Assad relied on them to consolidate his rule. They were the counterbalance that opened the door to a new Syria.

There are scores of understandable or objective reasons why the rural areas’ share of economic and human growth lagged behind. Numerous mistakes committed by state authority over the past 20 years overburdened the rural areas, driving their inhabitants into the poverty belts surrounding major cities and the scourge of mass unemployment.

Loafers and the collapse of public services over and above political, security and sectarian hegemony turned the rural areas into fertile ground for the first popular uprising in Syria since French Occupation times.

All this is now out of date. The round table meant to address these problems has been pushed aside. The regime chose the easier course of blunt repression. The insurgents erred by selling their movement down the river Syria’ enemies – whether Arab, foreign or global hegemons.

The result was Syria’s descent into a cruel civil war, where there is no room for reason and where evil and wrath prevail over all else.

The outcome doesn’t look promising.

Seventeen months after the outbreak of the crisis, Syrians at home as well as distant observers are back arguing over whose prognosis was more accurate. Everyone is sarcastically saying: We had forewarned of what is happening today. But each side then follows up this phrase with premises and conclusions.

The regime and its supporters reiterate that the oppositionists in Syria did not discern differences from other Arab countries and ignored regional and external interests whipping up support for any protest leading to Syria’s destruction.

The opposition camp in turn reiterates that the regime disregarded realities on the ground, chose to deny the existence of a genuinely internal problem and focused its efforts on a security solution that led to militarization of the popular uprising.

Speaking of disagreements, loyalists call for calm, urging the opposition to lay down arms, clear the streets and get involved in a “realistic dialogue” with the regime. As for the oppositionists, they set the regime leader’s exit as a precondition for a settlement involving his supporters in and outside government.

In brief, there are no signs of compromise by this or that side. As foreign interests overlap with the internal faceoff, the bloody war rages on. Everyone is looking forward to fundamental changes on the ground that would pave the way for political exchange.

Until then, Syria’s doors remain wide open to all manners of killings and destructions and to a confrontation so brutal as to justify the fears of Syria’s allies and enemies for the country’s future.

Meantime on the ground, configuration of borders of densely- and scarcely-populated mini-states is underway.

The Syria we know is dead. And all the dreams of a civic state in this sectarian Mashreq perished with it.

Also, not too far from Syria – meaning along its eastern, western, southern and northern borders – there are states and peoples paying the price of dispensing with a united Syria.

Iraq is bracing for new sectarian infighting. The alliance striving to bring down the regime in Syria is seeking to topple the current regime in Iraq. Even the United States, which won special privileges in post-Saddam Iraq, is growing closer to Christian Europe’s and the Sunnite Gulf’s belief that a dismembered Iraq is preferable to one ruled by the Shiites and dominated by Iran.

Jordan is steeped in a deep internal crisis resulting from shoddy governance and the state’s reduced chances of fully independent survival. Jordan is being pulled in opposite directions by two powerful magnets: one wanting it to decisively throw its lot against the Syrian regime and the other warning that Syria’s collapse would empower political Islam in Jordan and breathe new life into the old concept of “Jordan is Palestine.”

Turkey, which boasted being the regime’s heavyweight, is witnessing an Islamization process that would dispense with the trappings of civic equality introduced by Ataturk.

Talk of discrimination is already rife among confessional, sectarian, national and ethnic Turkish minorities. The miserable adventure of its theoreticians and politicians would force the Justice and Development Party to tighten its grip on power and thus undermine democracy as well as pubic and private liberties. Privatization would be the party’s only recourse to protect the country’s economic growth that would be flattened by the loss of Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Also, all the restrictions that curbed part of the PKK’s (Kurdistan Workers Party’s) power would dissipate. Much of Syria’s lands will provide fertile ground for rebellious Kurds striving for an independent national identity.

As for troubled Israel, existential questions don’t leave its mind. Survival of the (Syrian) regime means consolidation of the anti-Zionist “Axis of Resistance.” The (Syrian) regime’s downfall on the other hand would expose Israel’s northern front to negative repercussions regardless of who rules Damascus.

But the bigger problem for Israel today is the loss of its ability to launch preventive and pre-emptive wars. There are the added fears of Israel taking a miscalculated step that would see it pay the foremost and more exorbitant price.

Nasser slams Baath from beyond the grave

Speaking from beyond the grave, Egypt’s late president Gamal Abdel Nasser denigrates Syria’s ruling Baath Party in a speech made in the Sixties. A video clip of the speech posted on YouTube and now making the rounds on the Internet depicts Nasser saying in part:

“[He] came Thursday at the head of a Syrian delegation. They arrived at 7 p.m. and he said: 'Today’s happenings justify our ordering the dismissals from the army.’

"I said not at all, [the dismissals] stem from the behavior of the Baath Party in Syria. The discharge of officers, non-commissioned officers and enlisted men is a consequence of the Baath Party’s hegemonic behavior in apportioning positions to Baathists only and depriving [other] Syrians. It is the consequence of the Baath Party dividing the country in two, embracing racial discrimination and banking on sectarianism and minorities. It is the consequence of the Baath Party splitting Syria between Baathist and Syrian, the Baathist entitled to everything and the Syrian to nothing…”