Syrian rebels push advance into Assad heartland

Alawite cleric Ghazal in captivity (R) and earlier in military fatigue next to Ural 

Syrian rebels are pushing toward President Bashar al-Assad's hometown of Qardaha in Latakia province.

By Monday, the second day of their surprise offensive in the heartland of Assad's minority Alawite-cum-Shiite sect, the rebels had captured some 11 Alawite villages.

The villages include Aramo, 20 kilometers from Qardaha, and Baruda, where the rebels seized visiting Alawite cleric Badreddin Ghazal, a diehard Assad militant.

You can see above a photo of Sheikh Ghazal in military fatigue standing alongside Mihraç Ural aka Ali al-Kayyali, the man I dubbed in May “the ethnic cleanser of Banias,” who was also suspected of masterminding the twin Turkish bombings in Reyhanli.

There is already talk of a “prisoner swap” underway, which would see Ghazal released in exchange for setting free the women held by Assad’s shabiha in Latakia’s sports stadium.

"The rebels are not far from Qardaha, and the threat to Qardaha has moved from being conceivable to being a real one," Sheikh Anas Ayrout, a member of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) who is from the coastal city of Banias, told Reuters.

Monzer Makhous, the SNC representative to France and future Syrian ambassador in Paris who belongs to the Alawite community, tells the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, “The Free Syrian Army’s advance into the coastal region is vital, if only to prevent the regime from carving out a sectarian canton” there.

Saudi suicide Moaz (R) and the Minnigh explosion

Also Monday, the armed opposition captured the key Minnigh airbase in the northern province of Aleppo after an eight-month battle, seizing several tanks and other munitions and taking the base commander and soldiers prisoner.

Warplanes from the base had struck at villages across northern Syria.

Activists on Facebook today give credit for the Minnigh victory to a young Saudi suicide bomber who used an armored vehicle laden with explosives to breach the airbase defenses.

The Saudi suicide was named as “Moaz al-Abdelraheem.”

Egyptian military strategy analyst Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Safwat el-Zayyat last night described Syrian rebel gains in Latakia province as “very significant.”

He told Aljazeera TV’s Syria news anchor that when the armed opposition is able to move from Salma (a village northeast of Latakia) to within five kilometers of al-Haffah, which is the principal gateway to Latakia city, the questions become: Are the rebels planning to widen their bridgehead? Do they intend winning control of Jabal al-Akrad and the hills overlooking Latakia? Are they after cutting Latakia’s roads to Idlib or Aleppo or both?

“All this,” said Zayyat, “shows the regime has no military presence on the ground. It is unable to handle two battlefronts concurrently.”

Zayyat also took issue with yesterday’s report by Human Rights Watch, saying ballistic missiles used by the Syrian military is killing civilians and many children.

He said the HRW report “comes too late. The regime started using ballistic missiles in December 2012 – first against the rural areas in Idlib province.”

Ballistic missiles, said Zayyat, “are meant to leave what the military call ‘large footprints.’  So the regime using Scud missiles with a speed of mach 4, a payload of half a ton or more, and a lethal circuit of some 200 meters against village homes can only be described as a war crime of the first order.”

Syrian rebel tanks roll into the frontline

Syrian rebel tanks rolling into the field of battle yesterday

I have seen tank kills by Syrian rebels using anti-tank guided missiles.

I have also seen rebels driving away tanks captured from Syrian army facilities.

But it is the first time I see rebels in a tank formation rolling into Reef Dimashq (see above my screen grabs from a video posted on YouTube yesterday afternoon).

The formation included one or more of the following: T-72, BMP, Shilka and APC.

As I hinted in yesterday’s post, the Syrian rebels seem to have seized back the military initiative, launching major offensives against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad on several fronts.

They used tanks and heavy artillery to advance to within 12 miles of the Assad family’s mountain hometown of Qardaha in the province of Latakia, according to activists and human rights groups quoted by the Washington Post.

Videos posted by rebel groups on YouTube showed tanks firing on mountain villages and rebel groups raising their flags over captured government positions in four villages belonging to members of Assad’s minority Alawite-cum-Shiite sect.

The Latakia Coordination Committee said scores of Alawites had fled from the countryside into the city.

Charles Lister of IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center said the scale of the offensive, which appeared to be the biggest yet in Assad’s heartland, would come as a blow to the recent confidence displayed by the regime.

Aleppo's central prison under fire

Rebels in the northern province of Aleppo are meanwhile pounding Aleppo’s central prison ahead of storming it to free some 4,000 men and women being held there.

They are also threatening to seize Nubl and Zahra, two Shiite villages loyal to Assad. Activists say Assad’s allies, among them fighters from Iran and Hezbollah, had reinforced both villages.

The rebels had earlier revealed a list of six demands, including the surrender of Assad forces and their weapons, followed by a power sharing deal between the villagers and the rebels.

Assad said yesterday the country's crisis can only be solved by using an “iron fist” to eradicate “terror.”

Speaking at an Iftar meal in the countdown to the end of Ramadan, he also dismissed the political opposition as a “flop” that could play no role in solving the country's brutal war.

“No solution can be reached with terror except by striking it with an iron fist,” Assad said.

“I don't think any sane human being would think terrorism can be dealt with via politics… There may be a role for politics in dealing with terrorism preemptively,” but as soon as “terrorism” rears its head, it has to be struck down.

Also yesterday, Assad got cheering words from Tehran, where his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rohani said the Islamic Republic’s strong support of the Syrian president is unflinching.

“No force on earth can destabilize or undermine the deep-rooted, historic and strategic relations between the two friendly peoples and countries," Rohani told Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halki, who was in Tehran for the Iranian president’s inauguration.

In New York, Human Rights Watch today said in a press release: “Ballistic missiles fired by the Syrian military are hitting populated areas, causing large numbers of civilian deaths, including many children.

“The most recent attack Human Rights Watch investigated, in Aleppo governorate on July 26, 2013, killed at least 33 civilians, including 17 children.



“Human Rights Watch has investigated nine apparent ballistic missile attacks on populated areas that killed at least 215 people that local residents identified as civilians, including 100 children, between February and July.

“It visited seven of the sites. There were no apparent military targets in the vicinity of seven of the nine attacks investigated by Human Rights Watch. In two cases there were nearby military objectives that may have been the government force’s intended targets, but were not struck in either attack…”

Three girls said taken hostage in Assad’s hometown

Hafez Assad's tomb, the Assad mausoleum and Dr. Khayyer

Unrest and infighting involving the most prominent Syrian Alawite clans in President Bashar al-Assad’s hometown seems to have taken a turn to the worst with the kidnapping by pro-Assad shabiha of three girls from the dissident Khayyer family “to bring Qardaha to heel.”

An unnamed female Alawite activist tells Sky News Arabia, “(The shabiha) said the girls’ abduction would teach Qardaha a lesson. They said before they taught Deraa a lesson by locking up its children.”

“But this won’t happen,” she added cryptically.

“Kidnapping is not alien to Alawite families that have long suffered at the hands of the Assads’ shabiha and sidekicks. However, it’s the first time kidnapping takes place over differences of political opinion,” she said.

Qardaha is a sleepy mountain town of 20,000 Alawites overlooking the coastal city of Latakia.

Its chief claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of the late Hafez al-Assad, president of Syria for nearly 30 years.

It is also home to the Assad mausoleum, where Hafez, his mother Na’asa and son Basel, who died in a 1994 car crash at the age of 32, are entombed.

Tension and unrest have been on the rise in Qardaha since September 28, when local enforcer Mohammad al-Assad, a cousin of Bashar nicknamed Sheikh el-Jabal (or “Lord of the Mountain”), was killed in a shootout with rival Alawite clansmen.

According to various press and social media accounts, Mohammad al-Assad was in a town café when he overheard a discussion of the growing number of body bags and death notices in Qardaha, the escalating level of violence in the country and the risk this represents to the Alawite community.

Mohammad al-Assad took offense when a member of the Khayyer clan said Bashar should step down, having mishandled the uprising. He pulled out his firearm and started shooting, triggering a prolonged gunfight between his Assad and allied Shaleesh cohorts and members of the rival Khayyer, Abboud and Othman clans, all of them Alawite families.

Novelist and Alawite activist Samar Yazbek, a kinswoman of the Othmans, said last Monday five of her relatives had been killed.

The Khayyer, Abboud and Othman families are well respected within the Alawite community. They have produced many lawyers, engineers and doctors.

Hostility between the Khayyers, three of whose girls have now been taken hostage, and the Assads dates back a long way – to the execution of the poet Hassan al-Khayyer in 1979, according to France’s authoritative Le Monde.

The hostility was inflamed last month by the arrest of Dr. Abdelaziz al-Khayyer on his return from an official visit to Beijing with a delegation of the National Coordination Committee for the Forces of Democratic Change, an opposition group tolerated by the regime. He has not been heard of since.

Bashar’s father Hafez had jailed Dr. al-Khayyer, a physician, for 13 years.

Syria’s Corleone

Marie Michelet, writing for France24, quotes a French Syria expert on the state of play in Qardaha:

“If it’s a scene reminiscent of the film ‘The Godfather,’ that’s because this is indeed a town run by a ruthless mafia-style family,” said Syria expert Fabrice Balanche, who is head of the Mediterranean and Orient Research Group at Lyon University.

“Qardaha is Syria’s Corleone,” he said in reference to the Sicilian town immortalized in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mafia trilogy. “The Assad family has ruled the town mafia-style with impunity for decades.”

Balanche was not surprised that rival clans had started to turn against the Assads, who have maintained a stranglehold over the town since before they changed their family name from al-Wahesh in the 1920s [Wahesh is Arabic for “Monster” while Assad means “Lion”].

“They were originally a minor Alawite family that over time imposed itself on the region by brute force,” Balanche said.

“Many previously powerful clans have been marginalized, and we’ve been hearing for months that Alawite families are fed up of seeing their sons die and are worried for the future.

“But this is the first time we’ve heard of Alawites in Qardaha in anything like open rebellion.”

The story of the gunfight at Qardaha has also been told by former French diplomat Ignace Leverrier on his Un Oeil sur la Syrie (An Eye on Syria) blog.

Leverrier paints Mohammed al-Assad as a government-sanctioned Mafia lord, making huge profits from business across Syria and of using the Mukhabarat secret intelligence service as a weapon to terrorize the local population.

He even made money, according to Leverrier, by taking payments from families with relatives in prison in exchange for information on their health and whereabouts, continuing to give positive reports for cash when some of these prisoners had been long dead.

His killing would prove to be a key turning point...

Since September 28, Qardaha has been locked down, according to information from the local Revolutionary Coordination Committee. All roads leading to the town are blocked and no information has been allowed to come out...