Every passing day brings us a lot closer to it – the regional
war that no one wanted but everyone somehow took part in contributing to its
making. This is the natural outcome of a collective failure in leadership, and
a testament to the utter irrelevance of the existing international order.
Tuesday October
9, 2012
Today’s
Death toll: 197. The Breakdown: toll includes 10 children and 8
women. 65 in Damascus its suburbs (including 25 unidentified found between
Daraya and Qadam and 10 slaughtered with knives in Deir Asafeer), 53 in Aleppo,
29 in Idlib, 15 in Deir Ezzor, 13 in Homs, 12 in Hama, 6 in Daraa, and 2 in
Lattakia (LCC).
News
Special
Reports
Al-Omar said al-Assad worked out of an
office about 30 meters down the corridor from the room where the press
department was stationed. He claimed the beleaguered president was obsessed
with foreign media coverage of Syria.
DAMASCUS — The central Syrian city of
Homs, dubbed "the capital of the revolution" by the country's rebels,
was the scene of heavy fighting on Tuesday as regime troops pressed an
offensive against a key rebel district.
Iran regularly transfers money to
Syria to help Damascus maintain an acceptable degree of economic stability.
Although there are no accurate figures, it is estimated that Syria’s foreign
currency reserves deplete at a rate of roughly $500 million per month. Syria’s
need for other sources of foreign currency to maintain the value of its pound
will increase as it becomes increasingly difficult for Iran to secure its own
foreign currency needs.
Up until now, Assad has been able to
rely on the Alawites’ cohesiveness and support. The community has been a
bastion of support. But Alawite discontent could well be surfacing under the stress
of war and the fear of retribution.
Turkey will likely get away with this
week's reprisal, thereby giving a considerable morale boost to the Syrian
rebels. Assad's regime got markedly weaker this week, and will get weaker still
as Turkey paves the way for action against Assad, one strike at a time.
Yazbek, whose revolution diary has
shed light on life under the Assad regime, received the PEN/Pinter 2012 award
for an author who has 'fierce intellectual determination'
NATO is ready to defend Turkey against
Syria, says NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in a strong warning
to the Syrian government, which has been exchanging cross-border fire with
Turkey.
For the sixth consecutive day, Turkey
and Syria have exchanged artillery fire. Neither wants to see the Syrian
conflict turn into a regional war, analysts say, but other factors point to
rising tensions.
Law student Hanadi, 19, is eager to
see action on the front lines. Her ticket? A marriage of convenience to a
militia commander fighting to oust Bashar Assad.
An Islamist militant group claims
responsibility for suicide car-bomb attacks on Damascus Air Force intelligence
complex overnight.
"In terms of infrastructure,
major parts of Syria have effectively been bombed back to Ottoman times,"
said Ammar Abdul-Hamid, a Syrian activist and a Washington-based fellow
at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies… "We have a long way ahead
before we put the country back together again," Abdul-Hamid said.
"But once we do, and we will, it will be our achievement."
Op-Ed
“When we control Syria, we won’t
forget that you forgot us.” This is the
definition of a massive foreign policy failure on Syria by President Obama.
Arabic
Press (prepared by Steven Miller, FDD Research Associate)
Ahmed Ghannam, a member of the Chamber
of Industry in Damascus and a prominent figure among the Syrian refugee
community in Egypt, said that large numbers of Syrian businessmen and investors
are moving their money out of Syria due to the country's crumbling economy, and
most are putting their money into stocks and other investments in Egypt and the
Gulf. For his part, SNC member and former Damascus Chamber of Commerce
president, Basil al-Kawafi, pointed out that Assad's forces systematically
destroyed economic institutions and factories, and said that internal commerce
in Syria has almost completely stopped. Furthermore, he estimated that 20
percent of Syrian investors moved their money to Egypt, and that 70 percent of
investments from the Syrian market were withdrawn and moved to other Arab
countries.
Seven Alawite military officers
reportedly defected to Jordan today, the first mass defection of Alawite
officers from the regime since the Syrian uprising began. Khalid Bakkar,
coordinator-general for the FSA military council in Homs and its countryside,
said that their names will not be released for 48 hours, until their safety can
be guaranteed. The defections come after the first anti-Assad protests were
reported in his hometown of al-Qardaha, and after Shabiha members retaliated by
kidnapping a number of girls whose families were protesting there.
Ammar Abdulhamid & Khawla
Yusuf: The
Shredded Tapestry: The State of Syria Today
Imam Johari Abdul Malik, outreach director at Dar Al Hijrah mosque in
Falls Church, Va., and a contributor to The Washington Post’s local faith
leader network, argues
that “Islamic history provides clues on how nonviolent means can end conflict.”
No, it does not. Not because Islamic teachings are ill-suited to the challenge,
but because the circumstances we are dealing with are simply too unique. A
warrior prophet like Muhammad would have understood that.
Assad’s willingness to deploy tanks against unarmed protesters in a
consistent manner and his ability to wield the sectarian card so effectively transforming
so many of his co-religionists into willing enthusiastic murderers targeting
children as part of a methodological approach while raising the slogan of
“Assad, or we burn the country,” have long defeated the very ethos of
nonviolence. When faced with the triple hit of sociopathic use of violence, irrational
fears and international indifference, nonviolence became irrelevant.
In the early phases of the revolution, the nonviolent approach
encouraged more defections than observers were willing to concede, and enticed
towns and villages all over the country to join the revolution, but sectarian
loyalties proved the trump card and allowed the regime to recruit militias from
among the larger Alawite community. In certain regions, Sunni tribes and clans
who long became clients of the regime and whose livelihood depended on regime’s
contributions played an important role as well. So did the regime’s ability to
deploy criminal elements released from its jails, hire mercenaries, and receive
recruits and financial and logistical support from Hezbollah, Iran and Iraq.
The regime approached the crisis from the beginning as a civil-war-in-the-making,
doing all it can to pit communities against each other, playing on irrational
fears, persecution complexes and imagined histories. The regime knew very well it
seems what so many nonviolence experts are loath to admit, that in civil wars nonviolence
does not work. In the context of civil wars, “otherness” is a sufficient reason
for use of violence, and violence will continue to be used until the “other”
has been subjugated, or all sides are so exhausted that mediation, often
external, can take place. Defeating such a strategy required having an
opposition united around a vision and “armed” with a good set of technocrats
capable of putting an outreach strategy both to the rebels and the
international community. This is what we did not have, and what we are still so
far unable to produce.
This was my greatest fear coming into this revolution. For many years I
have not only called for nonviolent revolutions in the region, I specifically used the
term Jasmine Revolution in the Syrian context and outlined the challenges
that the opposition should prepare itself to face when it comes to managing the
transition period ahead. My call
received scant
attention and was eventually ignored. But is still pushed in this
direction while simultaneously trying, through the activities of the Tharwa
Foundation and its network of young activists scattered throughout the country
(and the region, Tharwa was active in Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Iraq and Palestine
as well), to create
popular awareness in this regard. How much we contributed what eventually took
place is open to question. But I am not trying to toot my own horn here, my
point is this: even though for years I have been saying and doing things to
facilitate the coming of a jasmine revolution in the country, when the moment
finally came, my first impulse was to say that we
are not ready.
I argued that the nature of the regime, the diversity in the country,
the complex geopolitical realities surrounding us and our lack of political and
institutional experiences require that we give more time to prepare ourselves
for the challenge ahead:
“…we need to work
on charting a clearer vision for the future of our country and adopt effective
communications strategies with our people that can enable us to bust the
various myths that the regime has spread over the years.
So long as minority
communities in the country still believe that the Assads are their protectors,
rather than the pariahs who amplify and prey on their fears, and so long as
many of our young still believe that the Assads are true believers in
resistance ideology rather than manipulators of it, we will have minimal chance
to incite our people to rise up.”
As we can all remember, the question of the silent majority dogged us
for months after the beginning of the Revolution, and the regime ability to
manipulate the fears and suspicions of minority groups continue to be
prodigious. A vision for the future continues to elude us.
Reactions to my article in opposition circles were pretty dismissive. A
colleague in the opposition who worked for Al-Jazeerah online translated
only the first part of the article to make me look anti-revolutionary. But
enough people knew better than to dismiss my warnings so callously. I continued
to be involved in discussions with in-country activists preparing for the
revolution, and I took part in making arrangements for the Antalya Conference
that was held on June 1-2. By mid-March, we had our spark, and the Revolution
was on. “Syrians
have broken the barrier of fear,” I said as I tried to remain
optimistic. But the power struggle that took place between different opposition
groups in the aftermath of the Antalya Conference, pitting personalities and
ideologies and communities against each other, made it clear that my fears were
amply justified.
But while my disappointment with the opposition was great, it was not
surprising. After all, I have been involved in the opposition for years, I knew
what to expect. But nothing in my experience prepared me for the dithering that
took place on part of the United States and Europe on the issue of
intervention. Dithering by Arabs was expected and Turkish fears of going it
alone were not surprising and remain amply justified. But after 18 months of
bloodshed on part of Assad, and so many warnings and warning signs along the
way that worse things could still happen if western leaders failed to adopt a
firm position on the use of violence by Assad, I am hard pressed to find an
explanation other than falling back on one of the proliferating conspiracy
theories out there. Does the U.S. want a failed state in Syria? Does Europe?
Can’t anyone see how easily this situation can spiral out of control and usher
a regional war?
To me, the situation remains unfathomable.
Rather than arguing
about what went wrong, let’s leave that to history for a while and do what’s
right: we cannot leave the fate of Syria be determined by anti-democratic
forces, the ongoing tragedy required a pro-active handling requiring diplomatic
as well as military involvement.
Video Highlight
Daraya, Damascus Province, locals find 25 burnt out bodies in
the nearby fields http://youtu.be/2ffMJHl6IQo
, http://youtu.be/O5xwazETfVg The
burial http://youtu.be/PBg2hK-ha4k
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