Throughout this tragedy the question 'Where is the humanitarian aid from the wealthy Islamic Gulf countries which should be distributed by the Red Crescent in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and by the opposition in Syria?'
From the Washington Post and al-Jazeera.....
By Anne Gearan and Karen DeYoung
President Obama is unlikely to shift his stance against the expansion of a U.S. role in Syria’s civil war, despite a death toll topping 60,000 and acknowledgment that key members of his national security staff favored a plan first proposed in June to arm the Syrian rebels.U.S. officials said that the issue was shelved in October after an extended “red team” analysis by the CIA concluded that the limited-range weaponry the administration was comfortable providing would not have “tipped the scales” for the opposition.
Syrian opposition forces already had sufficient quantities of light weaponry from other outside sources and raids of government depots, the analysis determined. The question of providing shoulder-launched missiles to shoot down government aircraft, officials said, was never considered.
It remained unclear whether senior officials who backed the plan, first proposed during the summer by then-CIA director David H. Petraeus, were comfortable with President Obama’s decision not to move ahead with it. Some U.S. and outside experts have argued that the provision of weapons to selected rebel groups, even if they are superfluous, could help empower and build loyalty among pro-Western factions.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress Thursday they had backed the proposal to arm the rebels. Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton was also said to be in favor of the plan.
Officials from several allied governments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about relations with Washington, said that they were convinced last summer that the administration was moving in a new direction, with the majority of top national security officials in favor of providing weapons. When a change in policy did not occur by September, many concluded that Obama wanted to wait until after he was re-elected.
U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal administration deliberations, said the subject has not been revisited since the decision was made and that there were no plans to reconsider it.
But the division exposed by Panetta and Dempsey was rare among the tight circle of Obama national security advisers. Some officials said the divisions were not particularly deep and that enthusiasm for the plan was tempered by the risks it posed. Administration officials have voiced increasing concern about infiltration of rebel ranks by Islamic extremists, including some affiliated with al-Qaeda.
In the case of the mobile surface-to-air missiles, called MANPADS, one official said, “We wouldn’t even consider it, because God forbid they would be used against an Israeli aircraft.”
Israel’s air attack last month against a weapons convoy en route from Syria to its Hezbollah allies in Syria was criticized by several regional governments opposed to the Syrian regime and by some rebel groups.
White House press secretary Jay Carney stressed the administration’s caution Friday. “We have had to be very careful,” he said. “We don't want any weapons to fall into the wrong hands and potentially further endanger the Syrian people, our ally Israel or the United States. We also need to make sure that any support we are providing actually makes a difference in pressuring [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad.”
Of those who favored some level of weapons supply during last year’s discussions, only Dempsey will remain on Obama’s national security team in the second term. Petraeus resigned as CIA director last fall before the agency analysis was completed, and Clinton left last week. Panetta will depart the administration soon.
On Friday, new Secretary of State John F. Kerry would not give his view of the debate or whether he took a position on it as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he said the U.S. approach to Syria is under discussion now, a possible reference to an interagency policy review this spring.
“We are evaluating now,” Kerry said at the State Department. “We’re taking a look at what steps, if any — diplomatic, particularly — might be able to be taken in an effort to try to reduce that violence and deal with the situation.”
Speaking with reporters a day before she left office last week, Clinton decried the spiral of death and desperation in Syria but said she felt she had done all she could “sitting where I sit.”
She declined an opportunity to say whether there was anything specific she wished had been done differently and sketched a grim picture of the future for Syria.
“The worst kind of predictions about what could happen internally and spilling over the borders of Syria are certainly within the realm of the possible now,” she said.
Asked about the likelihood of U.S. arms supplies to the rebels, however, Clinton said: “That decision has not been made.”
Clinton stressed caution about sending arms that could fall into the wrong hands. The administration has tacitly approved arms shipments by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while urging that the recipients be fully vetted.
“Sitting here today, I can’t tell you that we’ve been entirely successful in that,” Clinton said. “There are those who are supplying weapons and money for weapons, who really don’t care who gets it as long as they are against” Assad’s regime, Clinton said. Those nations “have the view that once Assad is gone, then we’ll deal with the consequences of these other groups who are now armed and funded. That’s not our view.”
Clinton was a chief advocate of a U.S. plan to empower Syrian opposition figures who commanded greater legitimacy inside the country, in hopes of giving Syrians a viable political alternative to Assad. She moved last year to confer U.S. bona fides on the new group, effectively usurping a group of expatriates who had laid early claim to the opposition mantle.
The political shift was intended to increase pressure on Syrian ally Russia, which is continuing to arm Assad’s army. But it appeared separate from any expansion of U.S. military involvement in the nearly two-year-old conflict and from the decisions of U.S. partners Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to ship heavier weapons to Syrian fighters.
U.S. allies and partners in Europe and the Middle East have been more willing to consider direct involvement in Syria but not without a sign from the United States that it is willing to put “skin in the game,” according to a senior Arab official.
“You have to be a full partner,” the official said. “If the United States begins to supply weapons, then everybody will line up behind them.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-unlikely-to-reconsider-arming-syrian-rebels-despite-views-of-security-staff/2013/02/08/e05a337e-7208-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_print.html
Syria and the US: The complicity of silence | ||
As President Barack Obama begins his second term, will the US continue to give mixed messages about Syria?
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| Throughout the Cold War, US meddling in Syria poisoned the well of US-Syria relations. Then, after 1990, there was co-operation on matters of mutual benefit, such as a response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and - a fact often conveniently overlooked - the so-called war on terror. As the US has sought new ways to shift regional alliances at arm’s length, a locally-instigated movement has achieved what no outside power could – it has presented the first significant challenge to the Baathist regime. Over the course of almost two years, non-violent popular protest has mutated into bloody conflict.
In some ways, Washington’s overt – and covert – support for the rebels is playing into President Bashar al-Assad's hands, allowing him to claim he is fighting foreign intervention rather than domestic dissent, while also giving him space to fight back as brutally as he wants with no immediate threat of military involvement by the US, NATO, or other western powers. The same forces which rushed into Libya - and just recently into Mali - are transforming Syria into another proxy killing field. But this time Washington’s silence contributes to the destruction. Armed fighters have made substantial advances and dealt heavy casualties to government forces, seizing equipment and ammunition. But decisive military victory remains far from their grasp, if at all possible. And, complicating matters further, one of the best-organised, highly experienced, well equipped and most effective of the armed factions – Jabhat al-Nusra – has recently been declared a terrorist organisation by the Obama administration.
Empire looks at the history of the US relationship with Syria and the current state of the armed uprising with interviewees: Richard Murphy, the former US ambassador to Syria; Douglas Little, a history professor at Clark University; Hasan Abu Hanya, an expert on Islamic movements; Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA bin Laden Unit; and Abu Hasan, a Jabhat al-Nusra commander in Syria. We explore who is right and who is wrong, and what is - or should be - the Obama policy towards Syria, with our guests: Bassam Haddad, the director of the Middle East studies programme at George Mason University, who is also editor of the online magazine Jadaliyya, and author of several books, including his latest Business Networks in Syria:The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience; David Pollock, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, and author of several books including his most recent Engaging the Muslim World; and Stephen Starr, a journalist and author of Revolt in Syria: Eyewitness to the Uprising. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/empire/2013/01/20131278582910669.html |
Syria’s Druze minority is shifting its support to the opposition
By Babak Dehghanpisheh
BEIRUT — Members of Syria’s Druze community, a small but significant religious minority, are joining the opposition in bigger numbers, ramping up pressure on the beleaguered government of President Bashar al-Assad, according to opposition activists and rebel military commanders.As the Syrian conflict has devolved into a bloody sectarian war, with many Sunni Muslims backing the opposition, some of the country’s minorities, including the Druze and Christians, have largely sat on the sidelines.
Assad has managed to maintain the support of many of his fellow Alawites, who adhere to an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and keeping the support of the minority groups has been a key goal of his government, which has tried to portray the conflict as a foreign plot rather than a homegrown challenge to its authority.
“The Assad government is trying to keep the Druze and other minority communities at bay to make sure they don’t side with the opposition,” said Farid Khazen, a Lebanese parliamentarian and professor of Middle East politics at the American University of Beirut.
The Druze community in Syria numbers only around 700,000, out of a total population of some 21 million, and has a history of rebelling under authoritarian leaders, rising up during the rule of the Ottomans as well as the French. Although there are communities scattered across the country, the bulk of the Druze, whose secretive religion is an offshoot of Islam, live in the mountainous region of southeast Syria.
In the past couple of months, according to opposition activists, there have been more than a half-dozen anti-government protests in Sweida province, the ancestral homeland of the Druze in the southeast that had remained relatively quiet since the uprising began nearly two years ago. And in mid-December, rebel fighters announced the formation of the first revolutionary military council for Sweida province. The council coordinated the most significant battle in the Druze region since the conflict began.
In that mid-January clash, dozens of Druze fighters joined a rebel assault on a radar base on a mountaintop in Sweida province. The fighters killed several government soldiers but were ultimately routed by troops that outgunned them; the fighters retreated down the mountainside, suffering many casualties as they pulled back, according to rebel fighters who participated in the battle.
Still, some of the rebels considered the operation to be a victory. “The symbolic meaning of the Druze participating in this operation was just as important as destroying the radar tower,” said a 36-year-old Druze fighter who goes by the name Tamer and participated in the battle after joining the Sweida rebels a few months ago.
The rebel fighting force paid a high price in the battle: Among those killed was Khaldoun Zeineddine, one of the first Druze officers to defect from the Syrian army, who was seen as a folk hero among the Druze who have joined the opposition.
A video posted online shows the aftermath of the battle with the bodies of several rebel fighters lying in snow, some of them with arms frozen in the air.
A government soldier with an accent that is distinctly Alawite, the sect of many senior officers in the military, walks by insulting the corpses and filming the scene. “I curse their religion and their God,” the soldier says contemptuously on the video as another soldier kicks a corpse.
Fears of sectarian violence
Some of the Druze in more mixed areas, such as Idlib province in the northwest of Syria, joined protests and even fought with units of the Free Syrian Army early on. But what has kept many Druze on the sidelines in their ancestral homeland until now is a fear of attacks by Sunni religious extremists among the rebels, some of whom consider the Druze faith to be apostasy.
Since last summer, there have been at least four car bombs in Jaramana, a Damascus suburb with predominantly Druze and Christian residents. One double car bombing in late November left at least 45 dead and more than 120 wounded, according to opposition activists.
The Syrian government has routinely blamed the attacks in Jaramana on “terrorists,” its label for the opposition. But opposition activists say the government itself is carrying out the attacks to heighten fears of sectarian warfare.
For some, the danger seems all too real. “The biggest danger for the Druze is the sectarian violence against them,” said Aline, a 24 year-old Druze woman from Jaramana who recently fled to Beirut to escape the violence. “In the end nobody knows when the situation will get out of hand.”
Yet there is now even a Druze-dominated unit of rebel fighters, the Bani Maarouf battalion, operating in the Damascus suburbs, including Jaramana, which was formed in late December.
Driven to rebel
What has led some Druze to support the opposition is what has also motivated many other ordinary Syrians: The government’s apparent inability to provide security or even the most basic services, according to opposition activists.
“They have lost all the basics of daily life,” a Druze activist who goes by Ziad said in an interview in Beirut, where he moved recently to escape the violence at home. “There is no bread, no gas, nothing.”
Notable Druze leaders have also weighed in, calling on the community to rise up against Assad. There are significant Druze minorities in Lebanon and Israel and, even though they are separated by borders, they still share a common bond.
“The Druze in Syria should join the opposition,” said Walid Jumblatt, an influential Druze leader in Lebanon who has a following across the region. “Their future is with the Syrian people. They can’t join a repressive government to kill people.”
The divided loyalties among the Druze, with some supporting the government and some opposing it, have even split families. Tamer, the fighter from Sweida, says some of the people in his own village no longer talk to him because of his ties to the rebels.
“We can’t turn back,” Tamer said. “We are exhausted from this conflict, but what can we do? This government treats us like we don’t exist.”
Suzan Haidamous and Ahmed Ramadan contributed to this report
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/syrias-druze-minority-is-shifting-its-support-to-the-opposition/2013/02/07/9e3f52c6-6d5d-11e2-ada0-5ca5fa7ebe79_print.html
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