According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, approximately 70,000 Syrians demonstrated in a large square in the restive city of Homs on Tuesday, as Arab League observers began a visit to the country to monitor a peace deal aimed at ending President Bashar Assad’s deadly nine-month crackdown.
The observer mission is part of an Arab plan endorsed by Syria on Nov. 2 that calls for the withdrawal of security forces from towns and residential districts; a halt to violence against civilians; the release of political prisoners; and the commencement of talks with the opposition. However, since Syria formally signed the proposal on December 19, upwards of 400 people have been killed by government forces. Given this, the Assad regime seems to be intensifying its crackdown, rather than easing up, a reality that has elicited widespread international condemnation.
Despite Assad’s ongoing brutality—at least 60 people were killed in Homs on Monday—reports have surfaced that the Syrian army is pulling back some of its heavy armour from cities, including 11 tanks from Homs, at the behest of Arab inspectors. Other reports contest, however, that the tanks are merely being “hidden,” and that vehicles pulled out of Homs are being relocated to nearby government compounds “where they could [be] deploy[ed] again within five minutes.”
Accordingly, it remains to be seen whether today’s relative calm is a true indication of the Assad regime’s willingness to accept the terms of the Arab peace deal, or whether the government is buying time to further consolidate its grip on the country. Irrespective, as today’s Briefing shows, a break in the violence, even if short-lived, will be welcomed by those Syrians who continue to risk their lives in defiance of tyranny.
HURRY ASSAD ALONG
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, December 21, 2011
Last week the Obama administration’s point man on Syria, Frederic Hof, went to Capitol Hill to apprise the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East of recent developments. Nine months into the uprising against a regime that has already killed 5,000 protesters, Bashar al-Assad, said Hof, is a “dead man walking.”
That’s not just the White House’s assessment, of course. Much of the international community sees it the same way. Even Hamas thinks that Assad has his back to the wall, which is why this long-term Damascus tenant is now looking to relocate. For the administration, said Hof, “the real question is how many steps remain” before Assad arrives at this final destination. In other words: How many more people will a dead man walking, desperate and with little left to lose, bring down with him before he gives up the ghost?
Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in February, observers have contended that Bashar is scarcely as bloody-minded as his father. Hafez al-Assad was renowned for slaughtering tens of thousands in a three-week-long siege of Hama in 1982. Sure, the argument goes, Bashar’s security services and paramilitary forces have tortured, raped, and murdered the civilian population at will, but he could never get away with razing an entire city as his father did. After all, times have changed. Bashar’s depredations are all captured on YouTube. The whole world is watching.
Thus the Obama administration backs the Arab League initiative, which [has] dispatch[ed] monitors to Syria, and put “witnesses on the ground.” “Our view,” Hof said, “is that it is much less likely that this regime will do its worst if there are witnesses present.”
It is true that the Syrian regime has stage-managed the foreign media—granting, for instance, Barbara Walters an exclusive interview with Assad while barring reporters from the country. But this hardly means that Assad is scared of being exposed as a murderer. A central part of Damascus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, rather, is to broadcast its ruthlessness as widely as possible: It posts its own YouTube videos of regime atrocities to show what’s in store for anyone who walks out into the street. The regime is waging a campaign of terror against the opposition. “Witnesses” do not deter terror. They are instead a requisite of any successful terrorist operation—stay out of our way, the terrorists say, or we’ll kill you, too. The more people watching, the better to convince the world that the terrorist will stop at nothing to achieve his aims.
Assad still thinks he can win. He is getting help from significant quarters, like Iran, Hezbollah, and now Russia. Moscow last week drafted a U.N. Security Council resolution that condemned the regime’s violence—and the opposition’s. Russia’s call for dialogue between Assad and the opposition is a direct challenge to the American policy that Obama articulated in August: Assad must go. The White House, by choosing not to lead, gave the Russians an opening to make trouble.
When it comes to Syria, the administration has gone into the strategic equivalent of college basketball’s four-corners’ offense: Spread out the ball-handlers and run down the clock. If the White House assumes that Assad is on his way out, why should it commit any resources to easing his passage? Yet playing out the clock is not a strategy for which any American administration is well suited. Washington has to be aggressive on offense simply because its interests are spread out across the world and are therefore susceptible to subterfuge in myriad regional contexts.
No doubt the Russians are eager to keep selling the Syrians weapons, even as their draft resolution would place an embargo on arms to the opposition. But there’s a larger game for Moscow, as well: As it was during the Cold War, Syria is an arena in which Russia can take on Washington.
The Obama White House hit the reset button with Russia, which the Russians see as a sign of weakness. After accusing Hillary Clinton of inciting violence during the course of Russia’s parliamentary elections last week, Vladimir Putin had the administration in a defensive posture. Clinton may not like Russia’s draft resolution on Syria, but she’s said she’ll work with it. And why not? If the Russians want to condemn the opposition’s violence, it is the administration that paved the way. As Hof said last week, the White House wants “to prevent this peaceful uprising from morphing into armed insurrection that would discredit the opposition, reinforce the regime’s narrative, complicate international support, and most likely lead to a bloody and protracted conflict.”
But the conflict is already bloody and already protracted. And the administration has complicated the situation by imagining that there is a legitimacy to the regime outside the presidential palace in Damascus. Everyone else in the world is following the real story, including U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who last week pleaded, “In the name of humanity, it is time for the international community to act.” The subject of his address was not Moscow. It was the superpower in suspended animation.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD IS EVERY BIT HIS FATHER’S SON
Jerrold M. Post & Ruthie Pertsis
Foreign Policy, December 20, 2011
Incredibly, the Syrian uprising has now entered its 10th month. More than 5,000 people have been killed, according to the United Nations, with thousands more imprisoned and tortured or driven from the country. Many Syrian activists fear the toll may be far higher. A newly released Human Rights Watch report details that army units have been given “shoot to kill” orders in dealing with unarmed protesters.…
Yet, in a remarkable interview this month with ABC’s Barbara Walters, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad 1) denied the extent of violence in his beleaguered country; 2) disputed the evidence in a U.N. report charging him and his government with crimes against humanity…; 3) claimed that the forces charged with cracking down too hard on protesters did not belong to him, but instead to the government; and 4) indicated that the Syrian people supported him—otherwise he would not be in his position. Does this suggest that Bashar is out of touch with political reality?…
To understand Assad’s political behavior from a psychological perspective and try to anticipate how he will behave, we must understand him in the context of the Assad family’s dominance of the Syrian political scene. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria with an iron fist for three decades, including enforcing draconian emergency laws in 1963 that helped him eliminate political opponents and pave the way for the family to secure long-term political control, despite being part of the minority Alawite sect. Emblematic of his brutal rule was the crushing of the uprising in the city of Hama in 1982, in which tens of thousands of Syrians were killed.
Hafez had originally designated his eldest and favorite son, Bassel, as his successor, and Bassel, the chief of presidential security, was perfect for the job. He was forceful [and] macho.… He stood in stark contrast to Bashar, Hafez’s second son, who grew up in Bassel’s shadow, weak and in his own world, calm with a soft voice. Bashar went on to become a doctor, specializing in ophthalmology. In fact, it was Hafez’s childhood dream to become a doctor, but his family did not have the financial resources to support him, so he entered the military and then politics instead. Thus, it can be argued that Bashar, in becoming a doctor, was fulfilling his father’s thwarted dreams.
So it was not surprising that when duty called, six years after Bassel was killed in a car accident in 1994, the dutiful son would abandon his medical career to be at his father’s side.… It was not taken for granted that Bashar, who seemed to lack the forceful character necessary to succeed his father, would replace him. Indeed, some family members looked to Bashar’s younger brother, Maher, who more closely resembled his father and eldest brother in his aggressive personality. In the end, though, Hafez chose Bashar as his successor, giving him the role of the dignified leader, and named Maher as the head of the Republican Guard, the enforcer.…
Initially, Syrians and Syria-watchers hoped that Bashar would be an open-minded, liberal, and reforming leader. But these hopes rested on a fragile foundation. The thrust of the argument was based on Bashar’s supposed “Westernization” during his time living and studying ophthalmology in London. Contributing to the Westernized image was his elegant British-born wife, Asma, whose parents had emigrated from Syria to Britain, and who worked as an investment banker with J.P. Morgan.
The Westernized facade proved to be all too thin, however. Bashar was 27 when he lived in London, a fully formed adult, and had spent his life absorbing his father’s political ideas and observing his leadership style, in particular how to deal with conflict. What’s more, Bashar only spent about 18 months in London and was almost certainly significantly insulated by personal security forces during that time, so his actual exposure to “Western” ways of life was likely quite limited. And, of course, mere exposure to Western culture, even if it is direct, is by no means a guarantee that an individual will adopt and internalize its values and ideals.
In any event, the stormy waves of political reality were to overcome whatever hopes he might initially have had to bring Syria into the modern world. As the pressure for political reform grew, Bashar found his minority Alawite leadership increasingly threatened, and his inner circle pressed him to put a lid on the restive Sunni-majority population, as his father would have done. As the second-choice son, and not the obvious choice at that, Bashar had to prove himself a worthy occupant of his father’s throne. Unlike his father, the lion of Damascus, whose powerful authority was unquestioned, Bashar was acutely aware of the concerns of the inner circle about whether he could successfully lead Syria.
In a revealing moment during the Barbara Walters interview, when asked whether he thought that his forces cracked down too hard on protesters, Bashar replied: “They are not my forces; they are military forces belong[ing] to the government.… I don’t own them. I am president. I don’t own the country.…”
Bashar’s comment that he doesn’t own the country is reminiscent of Qaddafi’s denial that he had any position of authority in Libya at the beginning of the unrest there. Likewise reminiscent of Qaddafi, who repeatedly claimed, “My people, they all love me,” when asked whether he thought that he had the support of the Syrian people, Bashar responded that he wouldn’t be in the position of president if he didn’t. But, in an apparent reference to the late Libyan leader, Bashar disavowed killing his own people: “We don’t kill our people. No government in the world kill[s] its people, unless it’s led by [a] crazy person.” Never mind that the claim is demonstrably false—his calm demeanor during the interview underscored this distinction between him and the emotionally unstable Qaddafi.
Perhaps a better comparison for Bashar is to Qaddafi’s own designated successor, his son Saif al-Islam, who was also seen as a potential force of modernization for his country. Saif was famously exposed to the Western world during his graduate training in political philosophy at the London School of Economics, and it is believed that he took the lead in ending Libya’s economic isolation. But fatefully for Saif, raised by his father’s side, as the protests mounted, he fully supported his father and helped carry out the violent suppression of the protest movement to the degree that the International Criminal Court indicted him along with the elder Qaddafi. As his father had vowed to “fight to the last drop of my blood,” Saif, giving up any pretense of reformer, vowed that he would “fight to the last bullet.”
Like Saif, and for all his veneer of Westernization, Bashar never learned from a powerful father how to respond to protest without resorting to violence, and totalistic violence at that. After all, the Hama massacre kept Hafez al-Assad in power for nearly two more decades. It seems likely that Bashar, like Saif, will persist with the present destructive course charted by his father until the end, for in the end “blood will out.”
ARMED WITH PHONE, AND DANGEROUS TO SYRIA
Marc Champion & Nour Malas
Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2011
[Last week], after villages in northern Syria’s Jabal Zawiya region came under what residents say was a hail of government tank, antiaircraft and machine-gun fire, Alaadine al-Yousef telephoned in his latest death toll. Some 105 people were killed the previous day in villages in the region, he told an activist group and cable network by satellite phone. As he has done before in documenting the killings in Syria’s uprising, he based his count on bodies he had seen and reports from other activists.
What he didn’t mention in that dispatch was that the bodies he viewed, 35 in all, were in the mosque of his own village. Some were piled atop of each other. All were familiar. “They are the dearest friends to me. They are all I know,” he said in an interview, via Skype, over a satellite connection.
International groups raised alarms [last] week that Syria’s uprising has reached its bloodiest juncture yet, with observer groups estimating the week’s death toll at 290 to nearly 400. Such death tolls vary because Syria has so far overwhelmingly blocked reporters and international observers from monitoring the nine-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. So fatality estimates are assembled by reports that come in, by twos and twenties, from witnesses like Mr. Yousef, a high-school dropout and former vegetable truck driver. His work is…undeniably dangerous.…
Mr. Yousef doesn’t claim to be neutral. He organizes anti-government protests in towns around the northern city of Idlib.… Two of his seven brothers are fighting with the main body of defected soldiers, the Syrian Free Army. The father of three young girls spent much of the summer, he says, hiding in olive groves.… He says he has been told of plots to have him killed. He takes the risks he does, he says, so that Syria’s uprising will stay on the international agenda.…
Mr. Yousef’s reports, as well as those from Syrians who have fled the country, end up in a United Nations tally of brutality that international governments rely upon as they calibrate how to respond. That number has climbed sharply to 5,000. U.N. human-rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the body has no doubt of the scale of its count, but acknowledged that Syria’s violence was proving hard to document.…
Other groups put the count higher. Avaaz, a global campaigning organization, is set to disclose that it has verified 6,237 deaths in Syria between March 15, the first day of organized protests, and Dec. 9. Its number includes 473 women, 403 children and 917 regime forces.… Syria’s government has vehemently contested the[se] casualty figures. President Assad last estimated the civilian death toll at 619.
The role of activists such as Mr. Yousef is one reason the Syrian government has warned that owning a satellite phone is a crime.… Government forces have raided his home four times looking for him, he says, destroying what they can and daubing the house in red graffiti. [Last weekend], troops, security officers and plainclothes thugs ransacked the home while he was out, spraying the rooms with machine-gun fire, another activist told Mr. Yousef, warning him not to return.…
Today, Mr. Yousef—who is known locally as Alaa—tours the Idlib area with his satellite phone and records the dead on video, uploading his footage and accounts to Skype chat rooms and the Web. He says he has a network of 12 to 15 fellow activists who tell him about events in towns he can’t get to.
Reached earlier this month, he recounted his day.… He went out to check on reports of seven deaths in the surrounding area, five in the town of Khan Shekhoun. Aziz Taan, a 42-year-old vegetable salesman and father of seven, died when a tank shell landed on his house. Khala Aldadou, a 55-year-old housewife, was shot dead while walking home from a funeral, leaving behind two sons and two daughters. Ibrahim Alnajim left his home to look for his 12-year-old son and never returned; his son was later found in police custody. Moustafa Alhissou, a 27-year-old university student and father to six daughters, was shot dead while helping people wounded when soldiers opened fire on protesters. Bassam Abdullah Alnajim, a 35-year-old shopkeeper, was inside his store when it was shelled, according to Mr. Yousef.…
Mr. Yousef recount[s] kissing the foreheads of the 35 friends he said he had just seen lying in [a] mosque. After that, he had heard shouts that the army was moving in on the building. He ran out and phoned the count to an Arab broadcast channel. “They killed all my friends,” he said. “There’s no one left but me.”
HOW A YOUNG BOY’S TORTURE INSPIRED SYRIA’S REVOLUTION
Peter Goodspeed
National Post, December 21, 2011
Thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb became the poster child of Syria’s revolution when a YouTube video of his funeral arrangements went viral in May. The chubby Grade 7 student from the southern farming village of al-Jizah, in the flinty desert scrubland that borders Jordan near the city of Daraa, disappeared April 29. He became separated from his parents and was detained at a police roadblock during a protest march in nearby Saida. After being held for a month, allegedly by the anti-terrorism branch of Syria’s Air Force, Hamza surfaced dead—his badly mutilated corpse was returned to his family.
In the video, the bloated and bruised body is covered with lacerations, burns and whip marks consistent with the use of electric shock and being whipped with cables. His face is swollen, his eyes blackened, his hands smashed. There is a deep dark burn mark on his chest and identical bullet wounds through both arms. His neck has been broken.… In preparation for burial, the corpse was sprinkled with rose petals and, on the video, the voice of the man who was inspecting Hamza’s wounds can be heard asking, “Where are the human rights committees? Where is the International Criminal Court?”
Like Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful young Iranian woman gunned down on camera during protests over Iran’s disputed presidential elections in 2009, Hamza has come to symbolize the more than 5,000 people who have died in nine months of anti-government protests in Syria.… Syrian protesters, who go into the streets every week to defy their own fears and tanks, continue to brandish posters displaying images of Hamza’s battered corpse and his innocent school photograph. Between shouts of “The people want to overthrow the regime…” they yell, “Did Hamza scare you that much?”
In a sea of sorrow, the boy’s death is an echo of the outrage that ignited Syria’s revolution in March, when Daraa residents came out to protest the arrest and torture of 15 boys, who, inspired by revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, had scrawled “The people want to overthrow the regime” on a wall. As the regime of President Bashar al-Assad tried to crush the protests, sympathetic demonstrations erupted across the country.…
Since then, reports of atrocities and massacres have been common. Just this month, 60 badly mutilated bodies were dumped in a park in the rebellious central city of Homs. Most had been kidnapped by death squads operated by the pro-government Shabiha (Ghosts) militia.…[Last] Tuesday, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nearly 50 people were killed. On Monday, it reported that security forces machine-gunned and killed more than 60 soldiers deserting their army base.…
In Syria, there is none of the sense of hope that filled Egypt’s Tahrir Square or the shocked sense of indignation that came with the first civilian deaths in Libya. But the violence has the potential to alter the Middle East because the country, which borders Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, is a geographic and political pivot. Syria’s collapse into Libya-style chaos would unsettle the entire region.…
The prospects for a relatively peaceful resolution of the crisis are slim. Mr. Assad’s regime is already drenched in blood and for decades has been ranked among the region’s most repressive.… In the end, individual nations may act…to put an end to Syria’s massacres.… Otherwise, Syrians may continue to mourn the tragedy of more dead children like Hamza al-Khateeb.
