Even should Assad lose Damascus, he can still withdraw to
coastal strongholds and hunker down for a longtime, while rebels fight over
spoils, and Arabs and Kurds battle each other over control of areas in the
north and northeast. Without a political process, this crisis will drag on for
years.
Thursday November
29, 2012
Today’s
Death Toll: 96, including 23 children
and 4 women: 51 in Aleppo (most in massacre of Zibdiya and Ansari), 15 in
Damascus and Suburbs, 9 in Daraa, 7 in Idlib, 6 in Deir Ezzor, 4 in Hama, 3 in
Homs and 1 in Raqqah. Points of Random Shelling:
198. Clashes: 103. In
Idlib, rebels downed a helicopter in Binnish and targeted another in Sarmeen.
In Homs, they attacked the Military Petrol Station on Homs-Damascus Highway
taking many prisoners. In Aleppo, they liberated a missile base as well as the
Mintar Airbase. In Deir Ezzor, rebels laid siege to the airport in Mouhassan (LCC).
News
U.S.
weighing whether to arm Syria rebels, ambassador says "The
president has never taken arms off the table," Ford told reporters.
"But it has to fit within a strategy of leading to a political solution
and not where one side seeks to conquer the other militarily. Imagine it this
way: How do you convince one side that is losing already to stop fighting when
they think their very existence is at threat?" Ford noted that the United
States also wants to avoid allowing advanced weapons to fall into the hands of
Islamic extremists, who make up a large portion of Syria's insurgents.
Syria
"firing mortars to stop refugees:" U.N. aid chief The
United Nations humanitarian chief accused Syria on Tuesday of firing mortar
bombs near the border with Jordan to prevent refugees from fleeing a civil war
that she says is "getting worse day by day".
Twin car bombings ripped through the
pro-Assad suburb of Jaramana, killing dozens. Mike Giglio on how both rebels
and the government say they didn’t do it.
Special
Reports
Under this approach, the United
States, United Kingdom and other members of the Friends of Syria, would declare
that new contracts with the Assad regime are illegitimate and that our courts
should not enforce them if a legitimate successor government in Syria
repudiates them. This could deter new loans and investments in Syria's oil or
other sectors and send a signal to the Assad regime that the economic pressure
will not loosen.
Some eye-catching video shows a
disciplined jihadi militia on the move in eastern Syria after ransacking a
regime artillery base.
A dark realization is spreading across
northern Syria that despite 20 months of violence and recent rebel gains, an
end to the war to topple President Bashar Assad is nowhere in sight. As a
result, civilians and rebel fighters are digging in, building an infrastructure
to secure rebel towns, care for the wounded and escalate the fight against
Assad's forces.
A new report reveals that Russia
printed and shipped eight planeloads of Syrian currency to Damascus over the
summer, providing a critical lifeline to the Assad regime.
According to the documents leaked by
Anonymous, Russia has since begun transporting Syria’s patched-up helicopters
by air. TIME emailed copies of the documents to the spokesman of Russia’s state
arms dealer, Rosoboronexport, who declined to comment on them.
Bashar
bashed: After months of slow progress, Bashar Assad’s opponents have the upper
hand Meanwhile, the rebels are well aware of what is going on beyond
Syria’s borders. “Assad is not going anywhere until the international support
for him changes,” says Abu Omar, the commander of a group of Liwa al-Tawhid
fighters in Aleppo’s Bab al-Hadid neighbourhood. He points to Mr Assad’s
continued backing by Russia and Iran, his main allies, and regrets that America
and Britain have refused to arm rebel fighters.
Syria may appear to be a small
country, but it is just the type of entagled conflict that can lead to a world
catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of
the 21st century, leading to world war.
Following their takeover of the Marj Al-Sultan Airbase south of
Damascus, a mere 10 KM from Damascus International Airport, rebels moved in on
Tuesday to take over DIA itself. Consequently, Syrian authorities shut down the
airport for “routine maintenance.” A day later, internet and cell and landline services
were shut down. Is it sabotage? Indeed, the main internet cable feeding into Damascus
does run parallel to the highway leading to DIA, but considering the fact that
landlines and cellphones were down as well all over Syria Damascus, this is not
likely. Is it a sign of panic on part of the regime? I think so. But that does
not mean that the endgame is nearing, it’s just the battle of Damascus about to
unfold. Slowly, the rebels were encircling Damascus, and the regime might be
planning a major offensive to prevent that from happening. Whatever the case
maybe at this stage, the battle for Damascus will likely be long and bloody. Let’s
not forget here that the better supplied and equipped rebels in Aleppo are still
having a hard time liberating the city.
But even should Assad lose Damascus, he can still withdraw to coastal
strongholds and hunker down for a longtime, while rebels fight over spoils, and
Arabs and Kurds battle each other over control of areas in the north and northeast.
Without a political process, this crisis will drag on for years.
But the problem here is that no one seems to want a political process
at this stage other than external players will little credibility on the ground:
the Russians and Iranians who continue to support the regime and whose vision
of a political process is meant to give Assad a lifeline, and the Saudi,
Qataris and Turks whose support of the rebels is spotty and continues to be
undermined by western, especially American, dithering.
At this stage, buoyed by Russian and Iranian support, Assad will not
take a political process seriously, unless he is forced out of Damascus and his
backers are thus forced to recalibrate their position. For their part, rebels will
keep seeing in a political process an attempt at circumventing their recent successes.
Islamists in particular will see a political process as a conspiracy meant to undermine
them and their plans for establishing an Islamic state. They will be right of
course. Meanwhile, the vision of “victory” espoused by most opposition groups
seem to revolve around the belief that rebels will end up “liberating” all of
Syria, including Kurdish, Alawite, Druze and Christian majority areas, at which
time a political process can be launched and a debate over rights and responsibilities
of each national and confessional group can take place. The fact that this vision
is nothing short of recipe for a prolonged civil conflict has not dawned upon
them yet, and until it does and until they realize that dialogue in the near
future will not save the regime but could save the country, the possibility of
launching a viable process is nonexistent.
Two technology
firms that monitor global Internet traffic report that Syria has been cut off
from the Internet. Regular landline phone and cell phones services have been
affected as well, Syrian opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid told me.
“Therefore, the possibility of accidental damage can be discounted,” said
Abdulhamid. “This is something done intentionally by the regime, and reflects
growing desperation on account of the recent advances made by rebels,
especially in Damascus.”
The communications
blackout may signal that the 20-month-long uprising against Bashar al-Assad has
moved to a new and even more violent stage, in what some are calling the battle
for Damascus. “With Assad forces now conducting major operations in Damascus,”
says Abdulhamid, “they will cover it up as much as possible and create their
own version of the truth.” ...
Assad’s desperation,
said Abdulhamid, is a product of the rebels’ recent advances. “In the last two
weeks, the regime has lost six air bases around Damascus and Aleppo,”
Abdulhamid said. “The rebels might not be able to hold all those bases, but
they’ve lifted arms from those bases, including the surface to air missiles
with which they’ve brought down 9 aircraft in the last two days—5 MiGs, 4
helicopter gunships.”
In effect, the
opposition has begun to carve out a small no-fly zone of its own. “The rebels,”
says Abulhamid, “are quietly laying siege to Damascus.”
Over the last few
days, Assad’s regime has suffered major losses in its clashes with rebels, who
have managed to encircle the capital, Damascus, even attacking the
International Airport there and forcing a shutdown of its services, said Ammar
Abdulhamid, an exiled Syrian pro-democracy activist and fellow at Foundation
for Defense of Democracies, in an email to the Daily Dot.
“As such, the move
could reflect a sign of growing panic in the regime and could be a desperate
move to disrupt communications between rebel groups, even though rebels rely
for the most part on satellite communications and short wave radio rather than
the internet,” Abdulhamid added. …
As was the case
during the Egyptian uprising, shutting down the Internet will only embolden
people to rebel and disseminate information anyway they can, Abdulhamid said.
“This shutdown
could be a sign that the regime is preparing for a major offensive in Damascus
and elsewhere, and wants to delay coverage of the event by international press
as much as possible,” he added.
“But that does not
make much sense really, considering the widespread use of satellite
communications. But if the regime is in a panic mode, then not all its steps
would be rational at this stage.”
It’s still unclear
how the Internet blackout happened—and for what purpose. While Syria’s
information minister blamed “terrorists” for the disruption, others suspect
that the government is behind the blackout. “I think we can discount the theory
that rebels did the damage, because landlines and cellphones were down as
well,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian dissident based in the United States and
a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The regime is behind
this, and seems desperate because of the recent advances made by rebels in
Damascus and elsewhere—but especially in Damascus.”
“The rebels were
quietly laying siege to Damascus. Not in the traditional manner, but by
capturing key bases around the city and making travel along the major highways
a risky affair,” he added. “I think the regime clearly panicked and it might be
trying to undertake some major offensive operations in the area to get the
situation under control, before the rebels are more organized and better
supplied.”
Rebels and
activists blame the car bombings in Jaramana on the regime. Jaramana is a mixed
Druze and Christian community, but there are many Sunnis, and Iraqi refugees.
The regime has been trying to get more recruits for its militias from their
ranks, without much success so far. Targeting these communities des not make
much sense from rebel perspective, but makes ample sense from the point of view
of the regime. The more fear there is, the greater the support it can get, no
matter how tentative, especially as things heat up in the City, and rebels
continue to encircle the city. The rebels are actually in a position to lay a
protracted siege of the city for the bombardment taking place.
The rising
popularity of smartphones and the Syrian government’s sharp limits on the
movements of independent journalists have made social media an especially vital
source of information about the conflict. The abrupt loss of the technology has
caused widespread fear, said Ammar Abdulhamid, a fellow at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies.
“Not everyone will
have access” to news about the conflict, said Abdulhamid, who has close ties to
Syria’s opposition. “There will be panic. There will be fear.”
Video Highlights
The pounding of Eastern
Ghoutah Region in Damascus continues http://youtu.be/jy1XzvzaA7Y Inhabitants of Douma evacuate
their town gain after another rounds of aerial bombardments http://youtu.be/FqqBSDva0cY In Daraya,
several members of the Ziadeh family were killed in aerial bombardment, this is
the family of known human rights activists Radwan Ziadeh http://youtu.be/oEbrhdhZgAo
Rebels bring down a MiG in Daar Azzah, Aleppo http://youtu.be/HMw0P4m6Dxo , http://youtu.be/Zxd0Ie5GrVI , http://youtu.be/krf6sSDYqWs The pilot
was captured and treated but his wounds were fatal http://youtu.be/qZZfN0VbuCo
In Deir Ezzor, MiGs took part in pounding the town Bouleil http://youtu.be/ghNCZ7QBrQQ
Current trend, using more women in pro-Assad militias in checkpoints in
Damascus http://youtu.be/u8R0HGGi1Y0
Kurdish Rebels in Aleppo form their own fighting unit called Azadi http://youtu.be/h4BGHCCV0hY
Benefitting from loyalist troops pullout from the region, rebels in
Hama come together in a new and larger formation http://youtu.be/wEgnE0IT0xY
Rebels in the coastal areas come in a larger formation as well http://youtu.be/FR-CzzfLTzE
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