At this stage, and considering the growing though
under-reported, problems he is having with members of his own Alawite sect, Assad
seems to be acting more on behalf of Iranian and Russian overlords than out of
loyalty to any indigenous agenda. The mercenary nature of his regime has never
been so obvious.
Monday October
8, 2012
Today’s
Death toll: 170. The Breakdown: toll includes 5 women and 7
children. 40 in Aleppo, 37 in Idlib (most in Ma’rret Al-Nouman), 35 in Daraa (including
30 in Eastern Karak), 32 in Damascus and Suburbs, 20 in Homs, 5 in Deir Ezzor,
and 1 in Hama (LCC).
News
Special
Reports
Several days of cross-border shelling
raise tensions between Ankara and Damascus. What are the dangers of escalation?
Ammar Abdulhamid & Khawla
Yusuf: The
Shredded Tapestry: The State of Syria Today
NBC reports:
Some Middle East analysts
see a potential tinderbox. “The situation is very volatile, very dangerous and
has the potential to escalate into all-out war,” warned Professor Fawaz Gerges
from the London School of Economics.
What could happen
if the rebels get the shoulder-held rocket launchers and anti-aircraft weapons
they want?
One likely
scenario, say some Middle East experts, is that the Kremlin will loosen its own
under-reported restrictions and sell the Syrian government – which Russia
considers a “client state” – the high-tech weapons that Assad has been
clamoring for.
If that were to
happen, some say it has the potential to unleash an arms race – and an all-out
war – on Turkey’s doorstep.
In that case,
Gerges believes, just one mistake, one miscalculation, could trigger a regional
war - or worse.
“If Turkey, a NATO
member, is fed up and invades Syria, NATO would have no choice but to intervene
in Syria. And you can bet that Iran would become involved, and this could
quickly turn into a region-wide conflict between Turkey, NATO, Saudi Arabia and
Qatar on the one hand, and Iran, Iraq, Hezbollah and Syria on the other.”
Luckily, this
nightmare scenario can be avoided. In fact, both Russia and NATO (read: the
U.S.) are using their considerable influence over Syria and Turkey,
respectively, to keep tempers in check.
But Turkey is
already bristling with almost 100,000 hungry Syrian refugees in camps on its
border. And Assad is well aware that Turkey is largely spearheading the rebels’
fight against his regime, supplying their weapons and hosting the military wing
of the opposition.
If a Syrian
warplane were taken down by well-armed rebels and crashed into a Turkish
village on the border, killing dozens, the incident could be the match that
ignites a conflagration.
“You have the
potential not only for a region-wide war, but also for international conflict
as well,” said Gerges.
The main problem here is that, even without adopting a policy of arming
the rebels, we are already facing the prospect of a regional and/or international
conflict. A policy of keeping “tempers in check” is not sufficient to resolve
the crisis.
Assad is not a legitimate actor, but no one has so far emerged on the
scene that can be considered as a legitimate representative of the aspirations and
concerns of the Alawite and other confessional minorities in Syria. The
international community is doing very little to help Syrian opposition get
their act together, while regional powers are busy arming different rebel
groups without any political vision for the future. As for Assad, he has become
nothing more than a glorified mercenary defending Iranian and Russian
interests. How can this situation not be conducive to wider conflict?
Every reason that has been proffered to justify inaction on Syria from
the beginning of the revolution to date has contributed to producing the very
nightmarish scenario that early intervention could have prevented.
The answer according to Mark LeVine, professor of Middle Eastern
history at UC Irvine is obviously: no. Duh.
The strange thing about this essay is that Professor LeVine starts by
admitting that rebels had “an inchoate leadership and no real plan forward.” Then
he asserts that, because of this, rebels “should have stuck to non-violence.”
Whom is he addressing here? If the protest movement itself, by his own
admission, was and remains fractured and there was no centralized
decision-making process, who could have made the decision either way?
From the very beginning the revolutionary process was driven by
activists on the ground, acting locally, with little networking nationally, no
political vision for the future and no political skills. Meanwhile traditional
opposition groups were not ready or able to fill that role. Add to the mix, the
nature of the Assad regime in terms of the family dynamics involved, the
communal dynamics involved, the ideological predilections, and the regional and
international alliances that the Assads are involved in, and the transformation
of the showdown with protesters become a much more complex phenomenon than what
rebels and activists did or did not do.
In a sense, the crux of Assad’s strategy in the beginning was more
about defeating the nonviolent ethos, as a necessary step towards defeating the
revolution itself. As such he did everything he could to draw blood even if
from a tiny segment of local populations in order to justify an even greater
use of violence on part of the loyalist militias. To my knowledge, none of the
nonviolent revolutions elsewhere have had to contend with this kind of strategy
deployed with such impunity, persistence and on the scale that we witnessed in
Syria. Moreover, in implementing his strategy, Assad has zealous regional and international
backers. Activists, meanwhile, had only verbal support from the international
community coupled with sanctions that had a negative impact on them as well and
not only the Assads. Instead of drawing clear redlines on the use of violence
and showing willingness to impose them, world leaders rushed to rule out any
sort of intervention, in effect giving Assad and his backers free reign to pursue
their strategy.
In time, faced with the willingness of pro-Assad militias to perpetrate
massacres against unarmed civilians, and to do it and lie about it with
impunity, going to lengths to stage the scene by planting weapons on the
corpses of the victims, bussing supporters from loyalist communities to
cleansed protest hubs in order to be interviewed by official media and toe the
regime’s line on what took place, and orchestrating car bombings local
communities had little choice but to resort to self-defense.
But nonviolent activists persisted in their ways. Armed activities in
local communities appeared as parallel course that imposed itself on the scene
gradually taking the lead.
Different communities and different groups in each community made their
decision in this regard individually and at different times as warranted by
local circumstances. Just as the case with nonviolent protest was, the armed
option was adopted in a haphazard manner.
Supported by local civilian recruits, armed defectors first emerged as
protectors of peaceful nonviolent rallies, but as violence by pro-Assad
militias increased, they turned into a more proactive defensive role of their
communities and neighborhoods, a process that eventually metamorphosed into an
armed insurrection. Certain ideological groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbul
Tahrir and Salafist groups, backed by Gulf-based supporters, led and fed this
trend. Nonviolence activists, the overwhelming majority of whom were (and
remain) pragmatists, moderates and secularists (liberals and leftists) had
limited choice in the matter. Once the slide towards militarization began,
nonviolence had little choice in the matter and had to cooperate by dedicating
themselves to media activities and local governance issues.
Due to the gradual nature of the process, world leaders had ample opportunity
and warning to do something to prevent the continued devolution, but they did
nothing. Protesters in Syria were given little choice, and were, in fact, betrayed.
What went wrong in Syria is more a product of the failure of the international decision-making
process than the choices forced on the revolutionaries.
Video Highlights
Nighttime clashes in Naher Eisheh, Damascus City http://youtu.be/b9VMUNjz86s , http://youtu.be/U5w2Tv6R7hY
The pounding of the town of Zabadani, Homs Province, continues http://youtu.be/3K0DuGs8DaQ , http://youtu.be/o6aOIgNV3FQ
MIGs pound the town of Anadan, Aleppo Province http://youtu.be/s45se94NOeA Leaving
scores of dead http://youtu.be/iNYJtt5CiYs
, http://youtu.be/ordhkc6k4ZM
A massacre in Ma’arrat Al-Nouman, Idlib Province http://youtu.be/AaezGaOxuR0
The pounding of neighborhoods in Homs City continues: Hamidiyeh http://youtu.be/GhGz0BVTP_c Khaldiyeh
http://youtu.be/0oORq19UHTM
The pounding of the town of Rastan continues http://youtu.be/q_T-Qd_CNu0 , http://youtu.be/lBG9r1LL9is
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