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Tues. 14 June. 2011 LATIMES  Lebanon's new Cabinet shows strong Syrian influence……..1 JERUSALEM POST  In Syria, army will be the key………………………….……4  Gantz: 'Assad doesn't know what tomorrow will bring'……..7 FINANCIAL TIMES  Why Syria will get away with it………….………………….7  Assad’s brother blamed for regime brutality……………….10 ASIA TIMES  Syria on the Boil, US Warship in Black Sea………….……12 THE AMERICAN  Obama’s Failure on Syria…………………………………..17 AL-ARABIYA  Syria is in defining moment for Arab World…………..…..19 HURRIYET  Ankara revisits Syrian policy………………………………24 DAILY TELEGRAPH  Breaking: Syrian state documents 'show Assad orchestrated Nakba Day raids on Golan Heights'………………………..27  Assad's death squads have had a busy few weeks. But don't expect the BBC to tell you …………………………….…..29 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE  Syria may be next for revolution – in the hearts of soldiers.33 TIME MAGAZINE  The Soldier Who Gave Up on Assad to Protect People…....35 YEDIOTH AHRONOTH  Don’t intervene in Syria……………………………………38 GULF TODAY  Dr. Abdullah Omran: Open letter to Assad………………...40 NYTIMES  Syrian Unrest Stirs New Fear of a Deeper Sectarian Divide…42 HOME PAGE Lebanon's new Cabinet shows strong Syrian influence Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati announces a 30-member Cabinet heavily dominated by the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah and its allies. Analysts say it does not bode well for Lebanese democracy at a time of uprisings across the Arab world. By Borzou Daragahi and Alexandra Sandels, Los Angeles Times June 14, 2011

Reporting from Istanbul, Turkey, and Beirut After a five-month deadlock that sowed uncertainty in politically fragile Lebanon, the country's prime minister on Monday further inflamed passions by announcing a new government heavily dominated by the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah and its allies.

Analysts described the new Cabinet as a relic from the past, when Syria thoroughly dominated politics in Lebanon, and said it bode 2 ill for Lebanese democracy at a time of uprisings across the Arab world.

"It shows how Lebanon is basically moving in the opposite direction of the 'Arab Spring,' " said Oussama Safa, director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a Beirut think tank.

Analysts predicted the Cabinet would win the endorsement of parliament, where the Hezbollah-led coalition holds a slight majority, but may not last long. Already, a Druse politician, Talal Arslan, announced his resignation from the new Cabinet after he was given only a position as minister of State without portfolio.

U.S. officials have warned the cash-strapped nation that it may lose $100 million a year in military aid if its new government moves too far into the orbit of Syria and its primary strategic partner, Iran.

Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who ascended to the leadership after the demise of the U.S.-backed government of Saad Hariri in

2 January, announced a 30-member Cabinet that includes representatives of all the country's major religious groups. But it was far from the unity government many international observers had called for. And Hezbollah and its Christian ally Michel Aoun control the key ministries of Interior, Justice and Telecommunications.

The government, said another analyst, "has Syrian fingerprints all over it," suggesting that the regime in Syria, now trying to suppress a pro-democracy movement as well as stave off mounting international pressure over the crackdown, was thumbing its nose at the world by sabotaging hopes of resolving Lebanon's long-simmering tensions.

The Cabinet excludes large swaths of the Lebanese political fabric. Gone are Interior Minister Ziad Baroud, a favorite of independents, and Defense Minister Elias Murr, who opposed Syrian interference in Lebanon. 3 Hezbollah's Al Manar television quoted Syrian President Bashar Assad as congratulating Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, whose post is largely ceremonial under Lebanon's political system.

"Nothing can happen in Lebanon without the encouragement from Syria," said Hilal Khashan, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. "This is not a national unity Cabinet but a one-sided Cabinet. It's a confrontational Cabinet. It shows the state of the political regime in Syria."

"This Cabinet will further destabilize the situation," he added. "Its life expectancy will be much shorter than the normal."

Opposition lawmaker Nadim Gemayel dismissed the government as "Hezbollah's and Syria's Cabinet," according to Lebanon's official National News Agency.

Hariri's refusal to end Lebanese cooperation with the United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of his father, Rafik Hariri — allegedly at the hands of either Hezbollah

3 or Syria — prompted Syria's Lebanese allies to push for his removal and paved the way for the new government.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday, "What's important, in our mind, is that the new Lebanese government abide by the Lebanese Constitution, that it renounce violence, including efforts to extract retribution against former government officials, and lives up to all of its international obligations."

Those obligations include support for the U.N. resolutions, and for the international tribunal looking into the Hariri assassination.

Mikati, in a televised statement, acknowledged that his government's path forward was "not covered with roses." He promised to work with other factions and asked for a chance for his government to prove itself. He said his priorities would be to reduce tensions in a nation that has yet to heal from a civil war 4 that ended 21 years ago, to defend the country's sovereignty and to liberate territories under Israeli control.

"We believe these constants are the basics for preserving Lebanon's independence and safeguarding coexistence," Mikati, a telecommunications tycoon and multibillionaire with a passion for politics, was quoted as saying by the National News Agency.

A highly fractured nation of 4 million perched between the Mediterranean Sea, Israel and Syria, Lebanon has long been a political and military battleground for more powerful regional actors. Its 18 officially recognized religious communities jostle for advantage against one another, often allying themselves with foreign powers, including France, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

The democratic uprising against Assad's rule has further shaken up Lebanese politics, adding yet another layer of uncertainty to a country already riven by sectarian tensions, allegations of espionage and armed militias vying for power against the state. HOME PAGE

4 Analysis: In Syria, army will be the key If the opposition can split the military, the prize will be control over the republic and the result will be impossible to predict. Jonathan Spyer, Jerusalem Post, 14 June 2011,

In the aftermath of the taking of Jisr al-Shughour by the Syrian army, it has become clear that the direction of events in Syria depends largely on the cohesiveness of Bashar Assad’s security forces.

If the army remains largely united behind the leadership of the dictator, then the brutal repression of the protests looks set to continue.

If, on the other hand, significant fragmentation of the military occurs, then the prospect is for possible civil war. Since large- 5 scale international intervention into Syria looks unlikely, the army has become the key.

The events in Jisr al-Shughour followed the claim, almost certainly false, by the regime that it had discovered the corpses of 120 policemen. These men had, according to Syrian official media, been massacred by the phantom “terrorist” forces who the Syrian authorities claim have been responsible for the uprising since its onset. Local activists said that the bodies were those of members of the security forces who had refused to fire on protesters and who had been executed by their own side.

But while the “terrorists” remain the likely product of the official Syrian media’s Soviet-style imagination, there is evidence that elements of the security forces have gone over to the opposition. So far, this has happened only sporadically, and has involved individuals of low and middling rank. The regime’s savage response to all signs of hesitancy in the security forces shows that it is well aware of the cardinal importance of this issue.

5 In the early stages of the uprising, in Deraa, elements of the largely conscript and mainly Sunni 5th Division sought to prevent the largely Alawite 4th Division from firing on demonstrators.

The result was exchanges of fire between the two units. Opposition sources say that a number of soldiers of the 5th Division were executed in the aftermath of these events.

In Jisr al-Shughour, it appears a larger-scale mutiny took place. An Associated Press report quoted eyewitnesses who described “thousands” of army defectors, who sought to slow the advance of the Syrian army into the town, to allow refugees to escape toward the Turkish border.

Assad is no longer ruling with even the pretence of his people’s consent.

6 Rather, the Syrian regime appears to have declared war on a large section of its own people. The 220,000- strong regular Syrian armed forces and the 64,000 full-time members of the state security services are almost certainly sufficient, if they remain loyal, and absent international intervention, to keep the regime in place. But will they remain loyal?

The problem for the regime has long been its narrow, sectarian base of support, centered on the Alawite community, to which the Assad family belongs. In the armed forces and the security services, the regime has sought to counter this by ensuring Alawite domination of the officer corps and of certain units.

The Syrian Arab Army, as it is officially called, has 11 divisions, of which two, the Presidential Guard and the 4th Armored Division, are largely Alawite and are considered reliably loyal to the regime. The regime also has a number of special forces units on which it can rely. The other nine regular units are mainly Sunni, and are worse trained and equipped. It is from units of this type, such as the 11th Division, that the defections to the uprising

6 have come. The officers of these units are preponderantly Alawite, with a number of regime-supporting Sunnis also represented.

The command of the security services shows the way that the regime has sought to co-opt Sunnis, while retaining overall Alawite domination. Of the four security services, two (Military Intelligence and Air Force Intelligence) are under the control of Alawites, while two (Political Security and State Security) are headed by pro-regime Sunnis.

Defections from the army have so far been sporadic and limited. Assad has sought to deploy a combination of the Alawite units loyal to him, the security forces and irregular, mainly Alawite fighters (the “Shabiha”) as his main instruments of repression.

He has tried, with good reason, to keep the less reliable, mainly Sunni units out of the fray, as much as possible.

7 The opposition well understands the now pivotal role of the military.

Leading dissident Radwan Ziadeh, interviewed this week by Asharq al-Awsat, noted that “our principal goal at this stage and all our focus is on the Syrian army.” He mentioned that the opposition has sought to organize demonstrations honoring the army’s role in national defense. The opposition’s “National Initiative for Change” document also envisages a continued role for defense officials in the transitional stage.

Whether any of this will be sufficient to cause real fissures in the Syrian army is not yet known. But it is clear to both sides, as Ziadeh noted, that a determined international response capable of bringing down the regime does not look forthcoming. The US administration has yet to even call on the Syrian dictator to step down. So if Bashar can hold his army together, he stands a good chance of surviving – to rule over a shaken, sectarian regime lacking any domestic legitimacy.

7 If the opposition can split the military, the two parts will then fight each other.

The prize will be rule over Syria. The result – impossible to predict.

The writer is a senior researcher at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, IDC, Herzliya.

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Gantz: 'Assad doesn't know what tomorrow will bring' Jerusalem Post, 13 June 2011,

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz on Monday said that the Middle East "is changing before our eyes and the Syrian president also does not know what tomorrow will bring and it is up to Israel 8 and the IDF to adapt to new realities [in the region]," Israel Radio reported.

Speaking during a Soldiers' Welfare Association ceremony in Tel Aviv, Gantz said that the IDF needs to be prepared for any challenge and what will enable this are its "values, battlefield legacy, and troops on the ground."

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Why Syria will get away with it By Gideon Rachman Financial Times, June 13 2011

As Syrian tanks prepared to advance on Jisr al-Shughour late last week, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, launched an offensive of his own. In a speech in Brussels, he dismissed most of

8 America’s European allies as a useless bunch of timewasters. I paraphrase – but not much.

Mr Gates pointed out that while all Nato countries had voted to intervene in Libya, most had chosen not to participate in the actual fighting. Even those European countries that are taking part began to run short of munitions just 11 weeks into the fighting – forcing an exasperated America to step into the breach. More broadly, a situation in which the US accounts for 75 per cent of the military spending in Nato was “unacceptable” and unsustainable. If it is not rectified, Mr Gates predicted, Nato faces a “dismal” future.

The conjunction of the Gates speech and the Syrian civil war is very telling. It explains why a 20-year experiment with the idea that western military force can put the world to rights is coming to a close.

Just a few weeks ago, that would have seemed a surprising 9 conclusion. Supporters of “liberal interventionism” hailed the decision to bomb Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya as evidence of a longed-for new era, in which dictators can no longer feel free to massacre their own people.

However a western failure to intervene, as the Syrian army brutalises and kills its own citizens, is likely to be a more accurate guide to the future than the Libyan campaign. There is, of course, a direct link between the west’s reluctance to get involved in Syria and the frustrating and (so far) inconclusive nature of the Libyan intervention.

However, the Syrian conflict also needs to be seen in the context of a generation-long experiment with liberal interventionism. That era began in 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the world’s sole superpower and a swift victory in the first Gulf war restored confidence in the power and effectiveness of American military might. Since then, the debate about how and when to use military power has waxed and waned. Western governments chastised themselves over the failure to protect the Kurds and the Shia in Iraq in 1991, over the Rwandan genocide of

9 1994 and over the many years of dithering as lives were lost in the Balkans. But a series of apparently successful interventions – Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone – gradually strengthened the belief that western military power could be used to end conflicts and save civilians.

The bitter experiences of the Afghan and Iraq wars, however, shifted the debate on military intervention once more. Both Barack Obama in the US and David Cameron in Britain promised to be leaders who would adopt a much more cautious attitude to foreign military adventures. Then along came the Arab spring and western leaders once again found themselves committing to military action, this time in Libya – Mr Obama with evident reluctance, Mr Cameron and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France with apparent enthusiasm.

The Libyan war illustrates how unfolding events can force a political leader’s hand. That could still happen in Syria. But it 10 seems much more likely that, this time, the west will stand aside.

In part, this is because of deadlock at the UN, where Russia and China – angry about the Libyan war – are blocking efforts to pass a resolution that even condemns events in Syria, let alone prepares the ground for intervention. However the broader context is the west’s diminishing ability and willingness to intervene at all.

The Gates speech effectively marks the end of the American ambition to turn Nato into the global, military arm of a unified western world. The Americans have flirted with this idea, ever since the onset of the “war on terror”. But, as the Afghan war has worn on, so the military effort has become more and more heavily dependent on the US.

The fact that Europeans called for a campaign in Libya that they are incapable of conducting alone has merely re-enforced the American view that the European arm of Nato is, to varying degrees, feckless and unreliable. Disarray and recriminations within Nato hobble the single most effective potential tool for western military intervention overseas.

10 Even more significant in the long run is the American anxiety that budgetary constraints, which are leading to defence cuts in Europe, are beginning to be replicated in the US itself. Admiral Michael Mullen, America’s top military officer, has called the budget deficit the single biggest threat to US national security. It is also the single biggest constraint on future bouts of “liberal interventionism”.

Money is not the only problem, however. Over the past 20 years it has become apparent that swiftly agreed-upon military actions can lead to entanglements that last for many years. There is still a Nato mission in Kosovo and an EU military mission in Bosnia, more than a decade after the fighting ended in both places.

As for Afghanistan – that conflict has now lasted almost twice as long as the second world war. Western governments are also only beginning to come to terms with what may soon be required in 11 Libya. Against this background, there are very few takers for yet another military venture – this time in Syria.

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Assad’s brother blamed for regime brutality By Abigail Fielding-Smith in Beirut Financial Times, June 13 2011

Among the thousands of traumatised civilians escaping violence across Syria, one name is repeatedly mentioned as being behind the brutal crackdown that has forced them to flee their homes.

“[Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad has nothing to do with what is happening on the ground,” said one resident of the Jisr al- Shughour area who fled to Turkey after seeing a village burned down. “It is his brother, Maher.”

11 The number of Syrians seeking refuge in Turkey has reached nearly 7,000 after thousands fled a military crackdown in the town of Jisr al-Shughour and the surrounding areas in north-west Syria in recent days. On Sunday, troops backed by tanks regained control of the town, the latest focal point for the three-month protest movement against the regime.

Maher al-Assad, the president’s youngest brother, is the de facto leader of the elite units that residents say have been deployed to quell the protests.

While the president’s role in directing the bloody response to protests, which activists say has killed 1,300 people, is shrouded in ambiguity, Maher Assad is seen as the public face of the crackdown and the regime’s chief enforcer. Last week Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s premier, accused him of inhumane behaviour.

12 “ Not unlike the 1978-1982 unrest, where [the then president] Hafez Assad’s brother was the brutal face of the regime in Hama, Maher is seen as the bad cop,” says Aram Nerguizian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based think- tank.

Rifat al-Assad, the current president’s uncle, was dubbed “the Butcher of Hama” after reportedly overseeing an assault on the central city as part of a crackdown on an armed Islamist uprising in 1982 in which tens of thousands are believed to have died.

Patrick Seale, Hafez Assad’s biographer, says the relationship between Bashar and his brother is different. While Hafez knew the military well, having risen through the air force ranks, Bashar has delegated military matters to his relatives, says Mr Seale, giving him less leverage over them.

Maher, like Rifat, is “the strongman of the regime”, says Mr Seale, but Rifat was “completely controlled – when he moved out of line, he was ousted”. Maher has a reputation for being unstable,

12 and is reported to have once shot his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, during an argument.

Some believe the president is captive to hardliners in the family.

Monday’s announcement that a travel ban had been imposed on Brigadier General Atef Najib, the president’s cousin and the head of security in Deraa, pending an investigation into the violence there, may have been aimed at conveying the impression of a divide between the decision-making executive and the enforcers of the crackdown.

Not everyone agrees with this explanation. “They are co- ordinating step by step, Bashar, Maher and Asef Shawkat,” says Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based human rights advocate.

Mr Nerguizian argues that the power structure in Syria is akin to a committee. “During moments of crisis it is more probable that the 13 hawks in the Assad power structure will assert themselves, Maher being one of them.” HOME PAGE

Syria on the Boil, US Warship in Black Sea Amb. M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times, 13 June 2011,

Seldom it is that the Russian Foreign Ministry chooses a Sunday to issue a formal statement. Evidently, something of extreme gravity arose for Moscow to speak out urgently. The provocation was the appearance of a United States guided missile cruiser in the Black Sea for naval exercises with Ukraine. The USS Monterrey cruiser equipped with the AEGIS air defense system is taking part in joint Ukrainian-US exercises, Sea Breeze 2011.

There is nothing extraordinary about a US-Ukraine naval exercise. Last year, too, an exercise took place. But, as Moscow posed, “While leaving aside the unsettled issue of a possible European

13 missile shield architecture, Russia would like to know, in compliance with the Russia-NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] Lisbon summit decisions, what ‘aggravation’ the US command meant by moving the basic strike unit of the regional missile defense grouping being formed by NATO in the region, from the Mediterranean to the East?”

The Foreign Ministry statement then went on to give its own explanation that the Monterrey was sent to European waters as part of the US administration’s phased adaptive approach to building the European segment of the global missile shield. The program’s first stage envisages the deployment of a group of US warships in the Adriatic, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to protect South Europe from possible missile strikes. The role of the US warship’s missiles in the Sea Breeze 2011 anti-piracy exercises is also unclear, the statement said.

“ We have to state that our concerns continue to be ignored and 14 under the guise of talks on European missile shield cooperation, efforts are under way to build the missile shield configuration whose consequences are dangerous and about which we have numerously informed our US and NATO partners,” the Russian statement added.

The US claims that this is a routine naval exercise. On the other hand, Moscow asks: “If this is an ordinary visit, then it is unclear why a warship with this type of armament was chosen to move to this quite sensitive region.”

Without doubt, the US is stepping up pressure on Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The US’s provocation is taking place against the backdrop of the turmoil in Syria. Russia is stubbornly blocking US attempts to drum up a case for Libya-style intervention in Syria. Moscow understands that a major reason for the US to push for regime change in Syria is to get the Russian naval base in that country wound up.

The Syrian base is the only toehold Russia has in the Mediterranean region. The Black Sea Fleet counts on the Syrian

14 base for sustaining any effective Mediterranean presence by the Russian navy. With the establishment of US military bases in Romania and the appearance of the US warship in the Black Sea region, the arc of encirclement is tightening. It is a cat-and-mouse game, where the US is gaining the upper hand.

Ostensibly, the regime headed by Bashar al-Assad is repressive since almost everyday reports are coming out that more bloodshed has taken place. But the Western reports are completely silent as to the assistance that the Syrian opposition is getting from outside. No one is interested in probing or questioning, for instance, the circumstances in which 120 Syrian security personnel could have been shot and killed in one “incident”.

The Western, Saudi, Israeli and Turkish involvement in Syria’s unrest is almost crystal clear but that is beyond the zone of discussion when we speak of “Syria on the boil”. In short, Russia has lost the information war over Syria. Henceforth, its dilemma 15 will be that it will be seen as being obstructionist and illogical when a laudable democratization process is unfolding in Syria and the “Arab Spring” is straining to make an appearance.

Moscow has made it clear that it will not brook a resolution at the United Nations Security Council over Syria, no matter its wording or contents. It also voted against the Western move at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week to open a Syria nuclear file – similar to the Iran file – at the UN Security Council.

Moscow’s dilemma is that it cannot openly explain its side of the US’s geopolitical agenda toward Syria. Any such explanation will expose the hollowness of the US-Russia reset, which the Kremlin under President Dmitry Medvedev assiduously worked for. But Washington is not going to let Russia off the hook either. It is certain to tighten the noose around Assad’s neck.

Put simply, the US wants Russia to leave Syria alone for the West to tackle. But Russia knows what follows will be that the Russian

15 naval base there would get shut down by a pro-Western successor regime in Damascus that succeeds Assad.

The stakes are very high. Last year, the deputy head of Russian military intelligence was killed in mysterious circumstances while on an inspection tour of the naval base in Syria. His body was found floating on the Mediterranean off the Turkish coast. To be sure, many intelligence agencies are deeply embroiled in the Syrian broth.

First and foremost, a regime change in Syria has become absolutely critical for breaking Israel’s regional isolation. The US- Israeli hope is that the back of the Hezbollah can be broken only if the regime of Assad is overthrown in Damascus and the Syrian- Iranian alliance is ended. Again, a regime change in Syria will force the Hamas leadership to vacate Damascus. Hamas chief Khalid Meshaal has been living in Damascus under Assad’s protection for several years. 16 All in all, therefore, any movement on the Israel-Palestine peace process on Israeli terms will be possible only if the US and Israel crack the hard Syrian nut. Washington and Tel Aviv have been trying to persuade Russia to fall in line and accept “defeat” over Syria. But Moscow has stuck to its guns. And now by sending the warship to the Black Sea, US has signaled that it will make Russia pay a price for its obduracy and pretensions as a Mediterranean and Middle Eastern power.

The parliamentary election result in Turkey ensuring another term for the ruling “Islamist” party AKP (Justice and Development Party) significantly strengthens the US position on Syria. Ankara has hardened its stance on Assad and has begun openly criticizing him. A more obtrusive Turkish role in destabilizing Assad and forcing a regime change in Damascus can now be expected in the coming weeks. Ironically, Turkey also controls the Bosphorous Straits.

By improving ties with Turkey in the past decade, Moscow had been hoping that Ankara would gradually move toward an

16 independent foreign policy. The Kremlin’s expectation was that the two countries could get together and form a condominium over the Black Sea. But as events unfold, it is becoming clear that Ankara is reverting to its earlier priorities as a NATO country and US’s pre-eminent partner in the region. Ankara cannot be faulted: it made a shrewd assessment and drew a balance sheet concluding that its interests are best served by identifying with the Western move to effect a regime change in Syria.

Additionally, Ankara finds it profitable that it identifies with the Saudi approach to the upheaval in the Middle East. The wealth Arabs in the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf are willing to send their “green money” to Turkey. Ankara also shares Saudi misgivings about Iran’s rise as regional power.

In sum, the US is slowly but steadily getting the upper hand over its agenda of a regime change in Syria. Whether Moscow will buckle under this immense pressure and accept a rollback of its 17 influence in Syria is the big question. Moscow has threatened to cooperate with Beijing and adopt a common stance over Syria. But Moscow’s ability to counter the American juggernaut over Syria is weakening by the day.

The course of events over Syria will certainly impact profoundly on the US-Russia reset. The Obama administration seems to have done its homework and concluded that it is worth taking that risk for the sake of ensuring Israel’s security. The warship that sailed into the Black Sea carries a blunt message to Russia to accept that it is a mere pale shadow of the former Soviet Union.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

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Obama’s Failure on Syria By Danielle Pletka

17 The American (the jornal of the American Enterprise Institute) June 13, 2011,

News today is that Syrian elite forces took back the northern town of Jisr al Shughour with a heavy show of firepower, including helicopters. The town is reportedly emptied, with refugees pouring into Turkey and others too afraid to step outside. There are now several thousand Syrian refugees in Turkey, signalling that Turkey, at least, has doubled down on its decision to turn on Bashar el Assad after a short but disgraceful pro-Assad interval.

But while the New York Times reports that the Syrian “government appears to have abandoned all pretense of trying to offer democratic change to calm an angry public,” the Obama administration has yet to give any teeth to the president’s May dictum that Assad may choose to lead a transition to democracy “or get out of the way.” The president has said nothing in weeks, and though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the 18 government attacks on the Syrian people “horrific, revolting,” she too has made clear that the administration is not planning on doing … anything. Rather, she says hopefully, the Arabs are “trying to, behind the scenes, get the government to stop. And they believe that that at the time is the best way to go forward. So we listen very closely to what people in the neighborhood, in the region say.” Aaaaah. That will work well. We listened to the Arabs when they said “Qadhafi must go.” We will listen when they say “Assad must stay.”

Subcontracting foreign policy to the Arab League is not good policy at the best of times, but when it comes to the future of the Middle East, it’s almost insane. Saudi Arabia, which now dominates the League, has been little more than a force for instability in the Muslim world—a sponsor of the Islamism that feeds al Qaeda, and an unstable dictatorship in its own right. Don’t get me wrong: I too advocated that Qadhafi must go, but the motives of the Saudi king were slightly less than pure. (Qadhafi paid to have him assassinated.)

18 If Obama, for whatever reason, was brave enough to call for Qadhafi’s ouster, and finally, to call for Yemeni President Saleh to step down, one might once again ask where the heck he is on Syria. This is the no brainer. We can argue that Libya is not a vital national interest; we can argue that Saleh was cooperating in the war on terror; but what can we say for Assad? A murderer. A sponsor of terrorism. A vicious dictator. He has brutalized Syria, had a hand in the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, funneled weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, worked with al Qaeda affiliates, and, finally, he has a nuclear weapons program. This is Iran’s main proxy in the Middle East; Assad’s ouster will be a huge blow to Tehran. But the U.S. ambassador is still in Syria?

What to do? First, not hide behind the Brits and the French at the U.N. Security Council and get a resolution condemning Assad. Second, ratchet up the sanctions on Syrian officials and start publicizing Assad’s bank accounts. Third, get the president of the 19 United States out of the sad corner he has painted himself into and say Assad is finished. Fourth, figure out who in the opposition to talk to and get all of them into Clinton’s office at State. Fifth, work with the opposition to nail down a transition plan for post- Assad. Do it all publicly.

No one elected the Arab League to run American foreign policy. We know the president doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t want to be forward leaning, and hopes it all goes away in time for him to be re-elected. But now is the time to lead. And if he doesn’t want to, perhaps he should “get out of the way” and let someone else do it. By all accounts, Clinton is eager for a more aggressive posture on Syria.

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Syria is in defining moment for Arab World Paul J. Sullivan

19 Al Arabiya, 13 June 2011,

Syria is once again one of those beautiful countries with a deep and fascinating history. If it were peaceful and more open to the world it could be a tourism paradise that could link its great sites to those of Turkey, Jordan, and more. The potential for tourism development in Syria is vast.

Syria also has a fairly well educated population and fairly good infrastructure. Its banking system was on a long road to modernizing for years prior to the Arab Spring striking them. There were also some economic reforms in process that seemed to help the economy move along. Prior to the present troubles the Syrian economy was growing at about 4-5 percent. But as with Egypt and Tunisia this growth was not evenly shared. Macroeconomic data pointed to a strengthening Syrian economy. But microeconomic indicators pointed to high unemployment and 20 underemployment. Corruption was rife and some people were getting very wealthy as most people stayed the same or worse.

Syria is yet another bifurcated economy in the Arab world that proved to be ripe for rebellion and dissent. This was kept in check for many years by a brutal and intrusive security services. The world is now seeing them in full action in the bloody response to rebellion. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, the Syrian Army is not looked upon favorably by many in the country. It has also done much lately to make its relations with the people more strained. Could the Army of Syria save its country as the Egyptian Army did? I doubt it at the moment. This could make one worried about the future of Syria and how it will recover from its recent difficulties. There is also the huge question about who would take over if the Asad regime indeed falls. The pressures on the regime are gigantic, both internally and externally.

The best way for Syria may have been to reform the economy and open up the politics of the country gradually and carefully. However, this all seems to be a moot point now.

20 One of the major lessons for leadership in the future is: when the tide comes up, and the economic tide for Syria was coming up prior to the troubles, make sure everyone’s boat is rising. Otherwise, expect trouble.

Another lesson for leadership is: go after corruption and wasta networks that are damaging your relations with the people before the people turn on you. The best leaders put forward efforts to help the people as a whole, not just the people who are connected. Syria had a real chance to make change before all of this happened.

Syria has many important neighbors and its relations with these neighbors have changed in recent weeks. The leadership of Turkey had showed great restraint in its application of its good neighbor policy, but recently has begun to really question what is going on in Syria and has let many refugees from Syria’s north into Turkey. During recent years Syria’s relations with Turkey have improved 21 vastly from the days of the tensions due to the Abdullah Ocalan events and the tensions over the PKK and other Kurdish groups. It was truly a marvel to see how those relations improved. Turkey’s relations with whoever takes over after Asad, if the regime does fall, will be vital to the future of Syria. They will also be important to Turkey. Turkey does not need an unstable a violent country bordering on chaos at its southeastern borders near Turkish lands that are mostly Kurdish.

Syria also relies on good relations with Turkey for much of its water, especially from the Euphrates, yet the Tigris also bookends the very important Tigris and Euphrates water basin that also includes underground aquifers that allow water from both rivers to percolate into Syria. Economic relations between the two countries were also on the upswing prior to the troubles. It is important to rebuild that as well.

Then there are the troublesome relations with Israel. One Syrian senior diplomat told me once: “Paul, this is easy. They give us back the Golan and we give them a peace treaty.” Surely there are more complexities to this, including the fact that a large amount of

21 Israel’s water is from the Golan and above, and that there are thousands of settlers on the Golan. There are also strategic interests for both in the Golan. Syria has allowed Palestinians, and maybe others, to try to jump the border into the Golan. This could be an indication of how bad this could get. Syrian tensions with Israel are part of the complexity of undercurrents in the country that could lead to many other problems.

The “Peace Process” is moribund and going nowhere. The Golan is an important part of it, but nobody seems to be talking much about it. Also, come September, when the Palestinians will ask the UN to recognize them as a state there could be real troubles at this border, especially if the violence in Syria is continuing, which I expect it will. Frankly, if there is no peace treaty in the next two to five years there is going to be very big trouble in the region and, possibly, another war.

Then there are the very complex relations Syria has with Lebanon, 22 including with Hezbollah and other powerful groups. Syria has been something of an entrepot for many things for Hezbollah from Iran and elsewhere for some time. Hezbollah has been somewhat reliant on Syria for certain assistance. Although Syrian troops left Lebanon a long time ago Syria is still quite powerful there. Then there is the looming report and potential indictments out of the Hariri investigation. These could be explosive in Lebanon, Syria and beyond.

If Syria falls into greater chaos this could have powerful effects on Lebanon. Who takes over next could also determine Syria’s relations with Lebanon. There are huge stakes here. Then, of course, there are the Sunni-Shia tensions that exist in both countries and these could get much worse if the Syrian rebellion turns more into a brutal and bloody sectarian contest. This could explosive for the entire region. Iran might get even more involved. The GCC states and other Sunni-led countries could see this as a building threat to them even more than today.

Syria’s relations with Iran are complex and somewhat shadowy. These relations involve trade, economics, and more. However, the

22 most important relations right now may be the support Iran is giving to the Assad regime in order to make sure it does not “lose Syria” and all of its vital connections to so many other issues. Iran’s influence on Syria seems more powerful now than before the troubles.

What is quite worrisome is that the problems in Syria might become an important “proxy battle” between Sunni and Shia that could spread. How the problems of Syria play out can determine Iran’s clout in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. This could also determine some aspects of Sunni-Shia relations for some time to come.

The ethnic and sectarian nature of Syrian economic, political, and demographic strains is something the world needs to take care with and understand better.

Iraq is a trading partner with Syria. One can only guess what 23 increased chaos might mean to the trading and other networks developed between these two important countries. If Syria also falls into greater chaos then the chances for terrorists and others to use this to the situation to their advantage in Iraq increases. Syria and Iraq share a long common border. Iraq has had its ethnic and sectarian strains. In some ways Syrian strains could spill into Iraq.

The situation in Syria is also of great concern to Jordan, which may face an influx of even more refugees. Jordan has been one of the most welcoming countries in the region and has taken in Palestinians, Iraqis and more. Now it could face refugees from Syria. Syrian-Jordanian relations have had troubles in the rather distant past and had been improving prior to the troubles. What might be Syrian-Jordanian relations might be in the future? That, I am sure, is worrying the King of Jordan, who recently showed great strategic skill in opening up his political system to relieve some of the pressures in his country. If this works out well for the King and his country then Jordan could be a model for how political reform should be done for some. The King has shown real leadership and has walked a fine line on certain political and

23 economic issues. I wish Jordan well. It is a small country with little resources that has survived because of the leadership of its monarchy and those who advise it. Now that the political system will be open let’s see what other leaders will rise above the tactical to consider the strategic on many fronts.

Syria could become a vortex of instability in its sub-region and this could spill, even if partially, into the greater Middle East. It is an important country for its neighbors and for others in the region, including GCC states who have not only investments there, but also see the great political and strategic stakes at hand in Syria. The Syrian troubles also have worldwide implications not only due to their importance in the “Peace Process,” but also due to their importance in the future developments of Sunni-Shia relations.

Syria could be a great tourism destination. It could be an energy bridge and a trade bridge from parts of the region to the outside 24 world. It is culturally and historically an important country for the region as well.

How this all works out in Syria could also determine how some in the rest of the world see the Arab World. Syria is in the middle of a defining moment for the Arab World.

(Professor Paul J. Sullivan teaches at National Defense University and Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

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Ankara revisits Syrian policy Sevil Kucukkosum, Hurriyet, 13 June 2011,

24 Only a day after its general elections, Turkey has begun a substantial re-evaluation of its Syrian policy, as more than 7,000 Syrians have now fled to Hatay while another 15,000 mass near the border, according to reports.

“Turkey will keep engaging with Syria [to urge it to enact reforms and abstain from violence], but Syria’s attitude will determine our position,” a ministry official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Hürriyet Daily News.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry held a coordination meeting Monday with the participation of the Prime Minister’s Office, during which officials made “a political evaluation on Syria,” according to diplomats.

The meeting came after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an said Thursday that Ankara would talk to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a “very different manner” after Sunday’s vote. 25 Ankara drawing Damascus’ indirect ire

Damascus, in the mean time, has signaled its annoyance at Turkey’s critical stance over the turmoil in Syria.

Though there has been no direct, official notification of disappointment from the Syrian administration vis-à-vis Turkey’s position on the Arab country, there has been increasing criticism of Ankara’s stance on the uprising in the form of weekly protests in front of the Turkish missions in Damacus and Aleppo, as well as critical articles in the press – particularly against Erdo?an, a Turkish official told the Daily News on Monday.

A group of 1,500-2,000 Syrians demonstrated against Turkey outside the embassy in Damascus late Sunday, while similar protests were organized outside the Aleppo consulate earlier in the day, the Daily News has learned.

Some protesters in Damascus climbed the embassy walls to pull down the Turkish flag and hang the Syrian flag in its place but

25 were prevented from doing so by Turkish and Syrian security forces.

The deputy foreign minister of Syria phoned ?mer ?nhon, Turkey’s envoy to Damascus, to say the government would no longer allow any protests at the embassy.

Still, the protests and the critical press have been perceived in Ankara as indirect messages of Damascus’ anger toward its northern neighbor.

Following Erdo?an’s recent remarks calling the Syrian crackdown “inhumane,” Dr. Bassam Abu-Abdallah, a professor of international relations at Damascus University who is reported to be closely associated with the regime, accused Turkey on Friday of being behind a shipment of arms to Syria during a TV interview with Qatari Al Jazeera.

26 Citing Turkish accusations leveled at al-Assad’s brother, Mahir al- Assad, Abu-Abdallah said: “The Turks must realize that the region cannot tolerate more interference or more of such an escalating language, which is linked to draft resolutions at the Security Council supported by the United States, which is not a friend of Syria. On the contrary, it is the enemy of Syria and supporter of Israel.”

Turkey has built strong ties with Damascus in recent years, but has been exerting growing pressure on the Syrian government to stop violence and make reforms in the country. Damascus, however, has not responded, leading Turkey to harshly criticize the Syrian regime.

Recent clashes between government forces and anti-government protesters have led thousands of Syrians to flee to Turkey in fear of bloodshed.

According to reports, Syria’s army, under fire for its crackdown on anti-regime protesters, was pursuing “armed gangs” in the mountains near Jisr al-Shughour, which is close to Turkey’s

26 border in the southern province of Hatay, after seizing control of the hotbed northern town.

Rights activists reported heavy gunfire and explosions throughout Sunday in the town after troops backed by helicopter gunships and around 200 tanks launched a two-pronged assault at dawn, Agence France-Presse reported.

State television said late Sunday that the army was now in complete control of Jisr al-Shughour. k HDN

Ankara re-evaluating its Syrian policy

A day after the general elections, Turkey has begun a reappraisal of its policies toward unrest-hit Syria after a recent spike in the number of people fleeing the Arab republic. Some 7,000 Syrians have sought refuge in southern Turkey since the beginning of the security crackdown 27 Syrian refugees stand beside their tents at the Boynuyogun Turkish Red Crescent camp in the Altinozu district of Hatay, near the Syrian border, on June 12, 2011. Some 400 Syrian refugees crossed into Turkey overnight, bringing to more than 5,000 the number of people to have fled the security crackdown in Syria, the Anatolia news agency reported on June 11.  HOME PAGE

Today's Zaman: 'Ankara holds ‘political review’ meeting on Syria'..  HOME PAGE

Breaking: Syrian state documents 'show Assad orchestrated Nakba Day raids on Golan Heights' Michael Weiss, Daily Telegraph, 13 June 2011,

27 I have just been forward what appear to be Syrian state documents leaked by the governor of al-Qunaitera, in south-west Syria, which suggest that the regime fully orchestrated the “Nakba Day” raids of Palestinian refugees into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on May 15.

The document (below) which bears the Syrian Republic emblem, is dated May 14, 2011 and describes an “urgent meeting” of Major General Asef Shawkat, the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Armed Forces, and the chiefs of security and military intelligence branches in the province in Al-Qunaitera, which is located at the Syrian-Israeli border. The memorandum outlines how the regime ordered the dispatching of 20 buses, each one with a passenger capacity of 47, to cross the border into Majdal-Shamms in the Golan Heights in order to precipitate a confrontation between Palestinian refugees and Israeli soldiers and UN peacekeeping forces, thereby distracting international attention from the Syrian revolution. 28 I quote the entire document, attributed to the “Office of the Mayor” in Al-Qunaitera province:

After an urgent meeting convened by the security committee on Saturday in the presence of the Mayor of al-Qunaitera, Major General Asef Shawkat -Deputy Chief of Staff for the Armed Forces-, and chiefs of security and military (intelligence) branches in the province, the following was decided:

All security, military, and contingent units in the province, Ain-el- Tina and the old al-Qunaitera are hereby ordered to grant permission of passage to all twenty vehicles (47 passenger capacity) with the attached plate numbers that are scheduled to arrive at ten in the morning on Sunday May 15, 2011 without being questioned or stopped until it reaches or frontier defense locations.

Permission is hereby granted allowing approaching crowds to cross the cease fire line (with Israel) towards the occupied Majdal- Shamms, and to further allow them to engage physically with each

28 other in front of United Nations agents and offices. Furthermore, there is no objection if a few shots are fired in the air.

Captain Samer Shahin from the military intelligence division is hereby appointed to the leadership of the group assigned to break- in and infiltrate deep into the occupied Syrian Golan Heights with a specified pathway to avoid land mines.

It is essential to ensure that no one carries military identification or a weapon as they enter with a strict emphasis on the peaceful and spontaneous nature of the protest.

The provincial security committee meeting is considered in constant deliberation in coordination with the Center.

May you be the source of prosperity for the nation and the party

(signature) 29 Dr. Khalil Mash-hadiya Mayor of Al-Qunaitera

The Golan border dash, combined with similar raids along the Israeli-Lebanese and Israeli-Gazan borders, killed 13 people in total and injured dozens more after Israeli troops opened fire on demonstrators who had pelted with them stones. Two hundred refugees broke through the border fence in the Golan Heights, though some, according to Israeli press accounts, were actually seeking asylum from Syrian violence, not protesting the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding.

This document (here) – which I have good reason to believe is absolutely genuine – appears to represent the first piece of regime- created evidence that Assad has cynically tried to manipulate Western and Arabic media during three-month Syrian uprising.

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29 Assad's death squads have had a busy few weeks. But don't expect the BBC to tell you Michael Weiss, Daily Telegraph, 13 June 2011,

As the Syrian city of Jisr al-Shughour emptied its streets at the weekend, with 5,000 refugees having fled to Turkey and another 6,000 sat waiting at the Syrian-Turkish border, Western audiences were treated to the following howlers by Syrian state media:

• This humanitarian crisis is really the largest spontaneous family reunion in history. Reem Haddad, the ginger stoogette of the Assad regime, told the BBC on Friday: “A lot of them find it easy to move across because their relatives are there. It’s a bit like having a problem in your street, and your mum lives in the next street, so you go and visit your mum for a bit.”

30 • The trip down the road to mum’s somehow coincided, says the Assadist media, with an insurrection of “armed gangs” said to have killed 120 mukhabarat agents a week earlier, thus precipitating the Syrian Army’s assault on an abandoned city that for some reason required 200 tanks, a fleet of helicopter gunships and thousands of soldiers. As for the armed gangs causing all the mischief, we now discover, courtesy of another Ba’athist tribune – Talib Ibrahim – that these were also “proxies” of Israel.

You’d think foreign stringers and Western news anchors would have got the hang of this by now: the Syrian government- controlled media is not to be trusted. Yet I’ve lost count of the number of references in the BBC to a “restive” or “rebellious” north-western backwater where a state-perpetrated massacre of civilians has been rendered as some evenly matched struggle for political autonomy, as if we all talking about the Catalonia of the Middle East.

Seldom is the simple question asked by journalists quoting regime propaganda: if the Syrian people are putting up a real fight or

30 waging their civil war, why are so many of them living in tents across the border?

Sky News leads its morning-after coverage with this credulous sentence:

State television said when Syrian forces stormed through the town early on Sunday they uncovered the graves of security men killed and buried by armed groups.

Would those be graves made by Zionist-Salafist space invaders from Mars, then? Or might they – just might they – have been filled by the security forces themselves with the corpses of defecting Syrian soldiers, just as a similar mass grave was found to have been in Deraa?

Even when the media get it right, they still manage to get it wrong.

31 Because this is the sad truth: reports of a full-scale “mutiny” of the Syrian military are vastly overblown and unnecessarily cruel to a population counting on an Egyptian-style wave of defections to secure regime change. The actual number of soldiers who have flipped to the opposition is extremely limited and what forces do exist are, by their own admission, incapable of mounting a serious resistance to Assad’s death squads.

On Sunday, shortly before Jisr al-Shughour had been re-occupied by the Army, Al Jazeera interviewed the Syrian general Hussain Harmoush, so far one of the highest-level defectors in the revolution. He said he’d put together a small unit of about 100 lightly armed anti-regime forces but that they had an exclusively defensive remit in Jisr al-Shughour: to ward off the advance of the army and shabbiha militias and to give residents time to run for the Turkish border.

Alongside this less-than-Spartan phalanx were a handful of locals – mostly young men – who volunteered to hang around their hometown to do what they could to stop a forthcoming scorched- earth campaign. According to the New York Times, some other

31 residents of Jisr al-Shughour “ran patrols and ‘monitored the area’ with hunting rifles, sticks and binoculars.”

Hunting rifles, sticks and binoculars were meant to square off with bullets that poured down “like rain” from Assad’s helicopters.

Agence France-Presse has interviewed four AWOL conscripts in Guvecci, Turkey who give their own horrified accounts in other parts of the country:

With a blank stare in his eyes, Tahal al-Lush said the “cleansing” in Ar-Rastan, a town of 50 000 residents in the Syrian province of Homs, prompted him to desert.

“ We were told that people were armed there. But when we arrived, we saw that they were ordinary civilians. We were ordered to shoot them,” said Lush, who showed his military passbook and other papers as proof of his identity. 32 “ When we entered the houses, we opened fire on everyone, the young, the old… Women were raped in front of their husbands and children,” he said, giving the number of deaths as some 700, difficult to verify as journalists are not allowed to circulate freely in Syria.

Another soldier, queried by AFP, told of how he’d seen a man stabbed through the head with a knife: “After seeing how they killed people, I realised that the regime is prepared to massacre everyone.” Hezbollah snipers, he added, had taken up positions on rooftops and been ordered to pick off any Army regulars who went weak in the knees about shooting civilians.

I know that, according to some British Muslims, “we are all Hezbollah” in London, but there’s a simple reason to dismiss Assad’s press releases as fiction. In 12 weeks, he has not been able to produce a single video showing that his military is embroiled in deadly combat with roving gangs of terrorists. The Syrian people, meanwhile, have uploaded thousands of unedited YouTube clips

32 depicting peaceful protests interrupted by acts of savagery such as one of this man being kicked in the head by soldiers.

Fifty more fatalities were recorded in other parts of Syria at the weekend: 35 in Idlib, 9 in Lattakia, 3 in Deraa and 3 in Damascus. And even as Jisr al-Shughour was “re-taken”, the opposition’s Local Coordination Committees, representing activists on the ground, put out a new statement reaffirming their non-violent principles and suggesting one of two possibilities going forward:

1. A dialog-based peaceful transition towards a pluralist democracy based on: Free and independent elections; A transition towards eliminating the rule of one party; Eliminating unlimited presidential terms and re-elections; Eliminating the current monarch-like republic system; Removing immunity for intelligence and security agents; Removing the official cover from those who stole public funds; And reforming public media that distorts facts and incites hatred. 33 2. Heading to the unknown by maintaining the current tactics of using violence against peaceful demonstrations, and sacrificing the country for the sake of the survival of an immoral and disrespectful regime. This scenario carries the risks of allowing foreign intervention and civil conflict, in which case the regime takes the entire responsibility for what happens.

Turkey is threatening to establish a “safety zone” in Syria if the refugee population reaches 10,000, which it most certainly will if those 6,000 border-dwellers are let in. That is dismal news. The recently re-elected Islamist government of Turkey is going to bail out a country that’s literally been dying for US and European and UN rescue for months – all the while denouncing Russia, China and Iran just to show that they’re our kind of people.

If Assad does fall, and the government that replaces him is not a sunny secularist democracy, you can be sure that it won’t be long before we’re treated to self-pitying polemics from Foggy Bottom and Whitehall about “who lost Syria?”

33 And wasn’t that mass-murdering Assad really the lesser of two evils, after all.

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Syria may be next for revolution – in the hearts of soldiers When soldiers refused to shoot protesters in Egypt and Tunisia, the revolution began. Now reports of mutiny in Syria suggest the Assad regime's crackdown has gone too far. Editorial, Christian Science Monitor, 13 June 2011,

Pro-democracy revolutions often start rolling only when individual soldiers refuse orders to shoot unarmed civilians. Those moments of conscience, in which a soldier’s reverence for life eclipses his duty to a regime, tipped the balance in Tunisia and Egypt. Their militaries defected en masse. 34 Now it may be Syria’s turn for a revolution in the hearts of its soldiers. They might be, as Lincoln put it, called “by the better angels” of their nature.

The uprising in Syria, which began in March, saw a turning point June 4 in the northwest town of Jisr al-Shughur. According to reports, the funeral of a man killed by a plainclothes officer turned into a protest near the headquarters of the military secret police. When some police started shooting, others refused to do so. The two camps ended up battling each other, killing dozens.

Alarmed by this mutiny, the government of President Bashar al- Assad sent troops last weekend to wipe out the town, forcing more than 7,000 refugees to flee to nearby Turkey.

Such a brutal response was meant to send a message of fear to would-be defectors and prevent that region from being controlled by opponents. But by killing even more civilians – in such a wholesale way – the regime may only drive more soldiers to defy their superiors.

34 In a prominent defection posted on YouTube by a Syrian dissident group, a soldier named Sgt. Ali Hassan Satouf from the town of Sahl al-Ghab explains his reasons for leaving the Army: “What is taking place right now is haram [forbidden]. They are killing my people, our brothers, whether they are Christian, Alawite, or Sunni.”

Syria’s top security leadership will be difficult to crack. It is dominated by the minority Alawi sect, which fears retribution if the majority Sunnis take power. Its intelligence units are trained to spy on military personnel and look for disloyalty.

Yet reports of soldiers refusing to shoot have become more common in Syria as the pro-democracy protests continue – despite a crackdown that has left an estimated 1,600 dead. The rank-and- file soldiers are largely Sunni. Their tolerance for mass casualties has lowered as they see demonstrators march for freedom. Many 35 of the defecting soldiers are being hidden in the homes of protesters.

Under the United Nations’ Basic Principles, governments cannot use abusive or arbitrary force, and security personnel have a right to ignore such unlawful commands. In dictatorial countries like Syria, honoring such principles isn’t easy, given a soldier’s oath to obey a command structure. But when faced with the possibility of killing innocents, a higher morality often kicks in.

And as is often the case, that mental revolution is the catalyst for a political one.

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The Soldier Who Gave Up on Assad to Protect Syria's People By Rania Abouzeid / Outside Khirbet al-Jouz, Syria Time Magazine, Monday, June 13, 2011

35 The Syrian colonel sits cross-legged on a patch of moist soil, wearing a borrowed plaid shirt and pale green trousers, surrounded by dozens of men who had fled the besieged northern Syrian city of Jisr al-Shoughour to an orchard a few hundred meters from the Turkish border. He says his name is Hussein Harmoush and shows TIME a laminated military ID card indicating his name and title. Everyone around calls him moqadam — Arabic for his rank. A colonel with the 11th Armored Division of the army's 3rd Corps, the 22-year military veteran says he burned his uniform in disgust more than a week ago, starting with the rank designated on his epaulets, then the rest of it.

"I defected from the Syrian Arab army and took responsibility for protecting civilians in Jisr al-Shoughour," he says. "I was late in taking this decision." His lower lip quivers. He struggles to maintain his composure. After a long pause and several deep breaths, the man with the thinning salt-and-pepper hair resumes: "I feel like I am responsible for the deaths of every single martyr in 36 Syria."

There have been growing reports of Syrian military defections in recent weeks, after regime loyalists escalated their attacks in the northwest of the country. On June 5, units of the army reportedly defected en masse in Jisr al-Shoughour and used their weapons to defend unarmed protesters. Some 120 security personnel were killed in the mutinous clashes with loyalists, according to residents and rights activists, although Damascus denies the mutiny and says the deaths were at the hands of "armed gangs" wearing stolen military uniforms.

Although foreign journalists are barred from reporting in Syria, TIME managed to get across the Turkish border along steep mountainous terrain to reach thousands of refugees, most from Jisr al-Shoughour, staying in open fields and orchards on the outskirts of the Syrian town of Khirbet al-Jouz.

Harmoush, a native of the Syrian city of Homs, some 160 km from Damascus, the capital, says his orders were clear. His division was told to leave its base in Homs and "sweep the towns," starting at

36 al-Serminiyye and continuing 5 km north to Jisr al-Shoughour. "We were told that we were doing this to capture armed gangs, but I didn't see any. I saw soldiers indiscriminately shooting people like they were hunting, burning their fields, cutting down their olive trees. There was no resistance in the towns. I saw people fleeing on foot to the hills who were shot in the back."

The refugees — who have just spent a chilly night in an open field under pouring rain — listen carefully and respectfully as Harmoush recounts his tale. They crouch in the mud, forming layers of concentric circles around the officer. He says he had been growing disillusioned with the military and the governing regime of President Bashar Assad for years, but like most Syrians raised on fear, he remained silent. The Sunni Muslim says officers from Assad's Alawite sect were given preference when it came to promotions and that some 85% of places in the officers' cadet corps were reserved for the President's co-religionists — the other 15% had to be shared among the rest of Syria's multisectarian and 37 -ethnic patchwork society. Assad has surrounded himself with Alawite loyalists as well as people from other sects, including Sunnis, who comprise the elite merchant class.

For Harmoush, the government's spin on events in the southern city of Dara'a, where antigovernment protests first erupted in mid- March, was further proof that the system he'd sworn to protect was corrupt. "I know Dara'a. I lived in Dara'a. There are no Salafists or terrorists there. The people of Dara'a were slaughtered," he says. He furtively watched dissident videos, taking care to make sure none of his soldiers saw him. He followed Arabic satellite news channels, seeking another perspective than that of the sycophantic Syrian press.

Harmoush says that in al-Serminiyye on Friday, June 3, he decided enough was enough. "When we saw them shelling the town, shelling it indiscriminately, I decided to defect. I knew my men. They are largely conscripts. I know that if given the chance — and a guarantee that they won't be shot for defecting — three- quarters of them will leave, but fear keeps them in their place. I told them I took an oath to protect my people and my country,

37 whoever wants to do the same and is a man of honor, follow me. Thirty did immediately."

According to Harmoush, the soldiers headed toward nearby Jisr al- Shoughour. More soldiers joined them. Soon, Harmoush says, he had 120 men under his command, including a lieutenant called Mazin who joined him along with his unit. They were there after June 5, the day hundreds of people who had gathered in a public garden were shot. "In Jisr al-Shoughour, we decided to defend the people until the last moment, but we had light weapons, rifles. They had tanks. We set up traps, an ambush. That brought us some time to evacuate civilians."

At one point, he recalls, about three dozen soldiers approached the defectors, claiming they wanted to join them. Instead, they opened fire on the defectors, killing many. "I tell you, I wouldn't have made that mistake," he says bitterly of the decision to let them join. "Shouldn't have made it, but things were crazy. The shelling 38 was so heavy, the civilians were all around us — I didn't have time to think. So some of the soldiers were martyred, others fled into the hills, and some came over near the Turkish border."

For the past few days, Harmoush and a handful of his men have been helping residents of Jisr al-Shoughour trek across the hills toward the safety of the Turkish border. His own family is now safely in Turkey. He won't divulge whether he still has his weapon, nor if there are other defectors among the refugees in the fields, although many residents say there are. Harmoush is grateful for the opportunity to help his people but is haunted by some of the atrocities he says he has witnessed committed by the Syrian security forces. Tears quickly well up in his eyes when he's asked if there's an episode that sticks out in his mind. A man sitting next to him puts his arm around the colonel, who is now crying. At least half a dozen other men, most with graying hair and weathered faces, also begin to silently sob. These are rural Arab men, from a conservative community, openly crying, their grief overpowering their pride. The colonel doesn't answer the question. Instead, his voice cracking, he makes a plea: "I call on people of

38 conscience, on people with humanity: Please help the Syrian people."

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Don’t intervene in Syria Israel, world would be wise to let Syrians topple Bashar Assad’s regime on their own Eitan Haber Yedioth Ahronoth, 13 June 2011,

Some 29 years have passed, yet there are still Israelis around here who would recall with a shudder the following statement, from the first Lebanon War: “Christians are killing Muslims, yet everyone blames the Jews.” This harsh statement, which followed the Sabra and Shatila massacre where Bachir Gemayel’s Christian forces executed many dozens and possibly hundreds of Palestinian 39 refugees, was rejected by the world.

Back then and today there were people, who are likely the majority among us, that said and would say that these sentiments were correct and wish the Arabs to kill as many other Arabs as possible. Yet the world still expects Israel to conduct itself differently.

As far as the question pertaining to the possibility of Israeli intervention in Syria at this time, the answer must of course be a clear no! That’s the last thing we need. Taking advantage of the current opportunity may prompt immediate intervention on the part of Syria’s ally, Iran. Indeed, Tehran is looking for a good pretext to provoke Israel and deploy its forces on the Golan Heights border.

There will be enough fools around here who would think deep in their heart, or say openly, that this would be a good thing and that we shall proceed to pulverize the Iranians. We are talking about

39 Iran, a state with a population of 70 million people, a huge army, and nuclear arms on the way.

Assad’s days may be numbered Yet if the question at this time pertains to intervention of foreign states in Syria, and this would be the relevant, proper question, the answer at this time should be no, or at least not yet.

Experts say that the process of the collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime is underway and that his days are numbered. If that is indeed the case, it would be important to present the current revolution in Damascus as “homemade” – an uprising that came from the people and ended with the people.

Intervention by foreign countries at this stage would leave a grave mark in Syria; years and decades from now people would be saying that the (democratic?) revolution relied on foreign assistance. Such assistance would have implications that go 40 beyond the daily life in Syria and may entangle foreign states there for long years.

It is difficult to see even our enemies suffer, especially women and children who did no wrong. It would be inhumane to say that we should just let the sides butcher each other. But what can we do? When it comes to relations between states, the almost only element that comes into play is interests. And Israel’s interest at this time is to allow the Syrian street to topple the regime in Damascus on its own. Good luck!

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Dr. Abdullah Omran: Open letter to Assad The Gulf Today (also published in Gulf News), June 14, 2011

SORRY Mr President, if we have inundated you with advice now and then, but we wish you understand that we do it from the hearty

40 feeling we have for Syria because of its geographical location and its historical role in the area.

We also constantly advice you so that the promising and positive changes in Arab society, particularly in the area known as Fertile Crescent, doesn’t go in vain. And that’s our wish.

Remember this is the area, which is in contact with fluid Iraq, an area in the vicinity of the wily Israeli occupation and an area surrounded by the embattled and factional Lebanon.

Your location is also surrounded by the rising and ambitious Ottoman (Turkey), in the shadows of Egypt and its old order and the ghosts of unemployment and political storm here and there, as well as the brewing Iranian expansion plus the politics of equation and balancing.

Therefore, when the voices of the Arab youths cried out, we 41 thought that the likes of you should go on the drawing board and start anew. We thought you would cultivate a new era different from the questionable past where repression was the response to defiance.

We really thought that you would overcome the skirmishes of Daraa by implementing the changes that your administration had promised in earnest. We thought you would overcome the excesses that dogged Saddam’s Baathism and that they had become relics of the past. We were mistaken.

Now the voices of your genuine friends are calling upon you to make positive reforms and put an end to violence lest you cross the Rubicon line.

We remember, at the onset of the uprising in Daraa, your administration confessed that reforms were long overdue and you called for national dialogue. However, the actions that later transpired completely contrast the sweet words.

41 What we heard thereafter was something like “there is a foreign plot” and instigation and that the protesters were “serving foreign interests.” We fear for you, Mr President, that the role of Syria in the Arab affairs is nearing the end paving way for violence to prevail over the people of this great republic.

The excessive violence and oppression that is prevailing is a risky and dangerous security solution only extending to another place the so-called Arab Spring.

Just like your father, May Allah Bless him, you have succeeded in the past few years in mastering the “game of nations” that required lots of compromise, horse-trading and negotiating - regionally and internationally. Sadly, you are of late resorting to the same tactics, subjecting your own people to violence and subjugation.

Mr President, Do you think that some national forces that are challenging you 42 are mere phantom and non-existent, and therefore there is no room for mediation or negotiations or cutting compromise with them? Where is rational thinking in dealing with partners in the homeland? Where are your abilities in the analysis and understanding of reality and changes? The excessive violence and humanitarian abuse make the Arabs and friends of Syria think that there is no control over military hardware!

Mr President, No one in the Arab World is able to provide cover for your system, which represses its people. You have surely broken the rules of prestige. You are urgently required to save the collapse of Syria and its society and (save) the shedding of blood of the Syrian children. Syria today is like a stem standing in a barren place without any cover from the wind that’s blowing it away.

It cannot be covered by the walls, if there can be any from Maliki’s shaky and fragile Iraq; it cannot have Lebanon fight with it when that country itself is but a powderkeg; nor can Erdogan’s magic come to the rescue of a country which is now embroiled in a civil strife. Syria will not have Russia withstand the international

42 pressure to stand by it in a time of overwhelming demand for reforms and changes.

Gone is the time when the winner and his party took all at the expense of the rest of the nationals. Gone are the actions of testing security and other policies on the people as if they were animals for a laboratory test. Whatever the case, a redress is still possible, Mr President.

Dr Abdullah Omran is the chairman and editor-in-chief of the Sharjah-based Al Khaleej newspaper.

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Syrian Unrest Stirs New Fear of a Deeper Sectarian Divide By ANTHONY SHADID NYTIMES, 13 June 2011, 43

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government’s retaking of a town this weekend that had teetered beyond its control is sharpening sectarian tensions along one of the country’s most explosive fault lines: relations between the Sunni Muslim majority and the minority Alawite sect to which the family of President Bashar al-Assad belongs, residents and officials say.

Each side offered a litany of complaints about the other, according to interviews with refugees, residents and activists, suggesting, even in a small sample, deepening animosities in a country where the fear of civil war is at once real and used as a pretext for suppressing dissent. Syria is a volatile blend of Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Kurds and others inhabiting the same land, but with disproportionate political power vested in the Alawite elite.

Jisr al-Shoughour, where the government used tanks and helicopters to crush what it called “armed terrorist gangs,” sits in a landscape as complicated as anywhere in Syria. It is a Sunni town

43 with an Alawite town less than a mile to the south, interspersed with Christian and more Sunni settlements.

One Sunni resident of Jisr al-Shoughour said he received a text message from an Alawite friend asking if his family was O.K. “I replied, ‘My two sisters with a baby have been killed,’ ” said the resident, who gave his name as Mohammed. Others accused Alawite neighbors of taking part in the crackdown, some coming from a town less than a mile away.

Some suggested that those same neighbors set up checkpoints on nearby roads, ostensibly to detain government opponents.

Alawites, on the other hand, shuddered at the prospect of Sunni insurgents who they believe may have helped wrestle Jisr al- Shoughour, at least momentarily, from government hands. “ I’m so worried that the country might be dragged toward a sectarian confrontation,” said Aqsam Naisi, an Alawite lawyer and 44 human rights activist in Damascus. “Jisr al-Shoughour is one example, and I hope it will be one that passes.”

The prospect alarms outsiders as well, and has been one reason that the United States and Arab neighbors have as a whole been reluctant to push out President Assad. “The sectarian aspect, the divisions and the animosity are getting worse,” said an Obama administration official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“ I don’t think it will go away,” the official added. “What happened in the northwest will only harden the Alawite feelings, harden them as a group, harden their animosity toward the Sunnis and vice versa. It will only harden this divide.”

The depth of sectarian divisions in Syria — a country no less diverse than Iraq and Lebanon, both neighbors that fought civil wars — remains in dispute, though they already have punctuated protests and crackdowns in towns like Baniyas, on the Mediterranean coast, and Tel Kalakh, near the Lebanese border, since the uprising erupted in March.

44 Syrian officials have suggested that militant Islamists have manipulated popular grievances and warned that the government’s collapse would endanger the relative security of Christians and other minorities there. Opposition activists have played down sectarian divisions, which they describe as a government ploy to sustain its four decades of rule. If anything, they say, the government has stoked tensions in a cynical bid to divide and rule.

The events in Jisr al-Shoughour are opaque — whether an armed uprising, a rebellion led by army deserters or a mixture of both.

But anger has clearly grown along with the uprising. Or, as another resident put it, “They are turning this into a sectarian battle.”

The prospect of sectarian strife underlines the very ambiguity of the Syrian protests, which erupted after the arrest and ensuing 45 torture of 15 youths in the poor southern town of Dara’a. The demonstrations quickly spread across the country, building off everything from misery inflicted by a devastating drought in the countryside to the utter unaccountability of security forces in rural regions long neglected by Mr. Assad’s state.

While opposition activists and American officials have portrayed the protests as largely peaceful, even they acknowledge that armed elements have carried out attacks on security forces. The government says hundreds in its security forces have died, though the number pales before the opposition’s count of more than 1,300 protesters killed.

“ We see the elements of an armed opposition across Syria,” the American official said. “In the northwest, we see it as having taken over. There are a lot of them.”

“We don’t really know who these armed groups are,” the official added, but noted that they are “religiously based, absolutely.”

45 The repercussions of the events in Jisr al-Shoughour have already reverberated across Syria’s border. By Monday, Turkey said nearly 7,000 refugees had fled across its border and, though it promised to care for them, the prospect of more displaced Syrians has alarmed officials there.

Criticism by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who considers Mr. Assad a friend, has consistently grown. Last week, Mr. Erdogan called the behavior of Maher al-Assad, Mr. Assad’s brother, who is said to have commanded the forces that retook Jisr al-Shoughour, “brutish and inhuman,” deeply angering Syrian officials.

The episode may have a more lasting impact as well.

So far, the government has relied on its support within the military and, more importantly, the intelligence services; the business elite; and the country’s religious minorities, namely Christians and 46 Alawites. After recent events, Turkish and American officials say they believe that some of the business elite have begun to turn against the state.

Minorities, meanwhile, are said to be growing more fearful over a government that has promised to deliver stability but instead finds itself in a protracted crisis.

In the hinterland of Jisr al-Shoughour, a predominantly Sunni region once a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood and known for its opposition to the Assad family, criticism was directed as much at Alawite neighbors as at the Syrian leadership.

Hamza, a 28-year-old day laborer, who like most interviewed refused to provide his last name, said some neighbors from Ishtabraq had joined paramilitary forces there. Another accused the government of arming Alawite neighbors, a longstanding charge.

46 “ People in Jisr know each other very well, and they know the villagers around us and we know these villagers are Alawites from Ishtabraq,” another resident there said.

Human rights activists cautioned that the anger was that — just anger.

“If there is no political will on the part of the opposition to turn this into civil war, how would the dirt of the regime be turned into mud?” said Wissam Tarif, head of Insan, a human rights group. “I don’t think it will turn into civil war, I just don’t see it.”

But the man who received the text message on Monday from an Alawite friend of 25 years was grimmer, in words that suggested inevitability.

“ As people, we don’t want anything to happen between us,” Mohammed said by phone. “But the people in this regime are 47 forcing us to hate Alawites.”

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The Atlantic: ‘Is Syria Hopeless?’..

Dallas Morning News: ‘Libya, it justified intervention. In Syria, not our problem?’..

Yedioth Ahronoth: ‘EU: Israeli, Turk trafficked human organs’..

Haaretz: ‘Refugees in camps near Syria-Turkey border serve as mouthpiece for silenced Syrians’..

Daily Telegraph: 'Syria: cousin [Brig. Gen. Atef Najib] of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad given travel ban'..

47 Fox News: 'US Lawmakers Call for Increased Pressure on Syria as Crackdown Escalates'..

Daily Mirror: 'Troops storming rebel town in Syria find beheaded bodies'..

Jerusalem Post: ''Iran helping Syria to crush anti-government protests''..

The Real News: 'Syrian Elite and Army Continue Support for Assad'.. [Vedio]..

Reuters Africa: 'Arab League chief signals divisions on Syria crisis'..

France 24: 'Syrian regime unleashes online propaganda campaign'..

48 Time Magazine: 'Tales of Chaos in Syria'..

Bloomberg: 'Arab League Members Want Syria Barred From Meetings, Ahram Says'..

Kuwait News Agency: 'Spain urges Syria to end "violent" against protesters'..

Haaretz: 'EU pushing peace plan based on Obama's '1967 borders' speech'..

Yedioth Ahronoth; 'IDF chief: Israel following unrest in Syria '..

Independent: 'Syria: 'They shot people who were trying to get away'..

Independent: 'Outrage in Damascus at fake lesbian blogger'..

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48 Guardian: 'Second lesbian blogger exposed as a man'..

Washington Post: 'A gay girl in Damascus and other online unicorns'..

LATIMES: 'Jonah Goldberg: Taken in by 'Gay Girl': The 'Gay Girl in Damascus' hoax is worse than a lie. It's propaganda.'..

Guardian: 'Renewed concern over missing Amjad Baiazy'..

Miami Herald: ‘U.S. denounces Syrian violence, but can't do much about it’..

Guardian: ‘What we can do to bring down dictators’..

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