Thursday 16 February 2012

Civil war: Syria


Syria's Neighbors Fear That Fighting Could Spread
February 15, 2012



Now that the uprising in Syria has turned into a heavily armed conflict, many in the region are worried that the violence will spread beyond its territory.

Syria borders Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Israel, as well as Lebanon, where clashes erupted last Friday in the northern coastal city of Tripoli.

Sunni Muslims in one Tripoli neighborhood began protesting against Syrian President Bashar Assad. They put up a huge banner on the side of a mosque that had a picture of Assad, wearing a military uniform, with a big red X across his face.

Trouble is, that banner was in clear view of the next neighborhood over, which is made up of Alawites. The Alawites are an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and they support the Syrian president, who is also an Alawite.

As the protests swelled, shots started flying in Tripoli. Men from the two neighborhoods fired on each other with rifles and rocket propelled grenades. Building were pocked with bullets, and at the end of the day, three people were dead.

Some of the older streets have balconies that look like they're falling down because they've been shot so many times. In fact, these bullet holes have been around for a long time. In some cases, for years.

That's because tensions between these two neighborhoods have existed for generations, and disputes are often played out with bullets.

Destabilizing Lebanon

Still, the latest flare-up has people in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region concerned that Syria's conflict could easily spread. After all, Lebanon had its own civil war from 1975 to 1990 and many of the old divisions still remain.

The conflict in Syria is exposing ethnic and sectarian divides. Syria is ruled by Assad and other Alawites, yet they make just a little over 10 percent of the population. Most Syrians are Sunnis. The country also has substantial Kurdish and Christian populations.

Lebanese soldiers patrol in the northern city of Tripoli on Sunday, Feb. 12, following clashes between Lebanese Sunni Muslims, who oppose Syria's regime, and Alawites, who support it. The rival Lebanese factions fired guns and rocket-propelled grenades at each other last week, killing three people.

Yezid Sayigh, with the Carnegie Middle East Center, says that as the Syrian regime's hold on the country erodes and the opposition gains strength, these divides will only sharpen.

"I think that the militarization of the opposition in Syria will lead not only to fragmentation of armed forces inside Syria, but that it will necessarily bring in the regional geo-political conflict and rivalries in a way [that] will destabilize neighbors," says Sayigh.

To imagine all the scenarios of a regional conflagration can make your head spin.
One possibility is that the Syrian regime will encourage various groups to act out against neighboring states. Turkey, for example, has gone from being a Syrian ally to a harsh critic of the Syrian regime over the past year.

Sayigh says the Syrian regime could encourage the Kurds of Syria to help Kurdish militants carry out attacks in Turkey. Or, he says the Syrian opposition, made up mostly of Sunnis, might embolden Sunni leaders in Iraq to try and break off into their own, independent region.

Al-Qaida Weighs In

And then there's the Al Qaida factor.

In recent days, the head of al-Qaida, Ayman al Zawahiri, released a video calling on all Muslims to support the Syrian uprising. This feeds directly into the Syrian regime's narrative that the uprising is not a grassroots movement, but rather a grand act of terrorism, sponsored by America and Israel.

While the Syrians have not produced evidence to support such a theory, the bloodshed keeps getting worse. Two car bombs recently killed 28 people in the Syrian city of Aleppo. And Iraqis from notorious militant enclaves are pledging support and guns.

Andrew Tabler, with the Washington Institute for Near East policy, says it's still too soon to say that al-Qaida has entered the Syrian fray.

"The Syrian government permitted these groups to be in Syria for years, as long as they transited Syria and they went to places like Iraq or Lebanon to fight against the regime's enemies," Tabler said. "Now that technology, the technology of the car bomb is coming back to bite them. Is it actually al-Qaida? We're not exactly sure."

But the technology to do this, the know-how, and the people to do it have been in Syria, at the invitation of the Assad regime for almost a decade. So it's no surprise that people wanting to fight back would take matters into their own hands in such a way.

So far there's been no al-Qaida claim of responsibility for the Aleppo attack, or for similar, earlier attacks in Syria's capital, Damascus.

Still most analysts agree that the longer this conflict rages on, the more likely it is that many of these scenarios could play out.


Explosion hits oil pipeline in Syria's Homs


15 February, 2012

An explosion hit a major oil pipeline feeding a refinery in the Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday, near a large Sunni Muslim district under bombardment by government forces, residents said.

A large plume of smoke was still rising from the pipeline, which runs near farmland at the edge of Baba Amro district, some two hours after the blast, they said.

It was not clear what caused the explosion. The pipeline, which runs from the Rumeilan fields in the eastern Syriac Desert to the Homs refinery, one of two in the country, has been hit several times before during the 11-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Footage from an activist's camera feeding live footage from Homs via the internet showed a dense plume of smoke rising behind houses in Baba Amro.

The authorities have accused "terrorist saboteurs" of hitting the pipeline while opposition activists said the military, which began firing shells, mortar rounds and rockets into Baba Amro on Feb 3, has been hitting it by mistake.


Assad proposes referendum in strifetorn Syria
Syrian opposition leaders and the West have scorned a new offer by President Bashar al-Assad to hold multi-party elections, as his troops mounted more attacks on rebel-held areas.


15 February, 2012

Assad promised a referendum in two weeks' time on a new constitution leading to elections within 90 days, but made clear he still planned to crush the uprising against him by force.

The military unleashed a new offensive in Hama, a city with a bloody history of resistance to Assad's late father Hafez al-Assad, firing at residential neighborhoods with anti-aircraft guns mounted on armored vehicles, opposition activists said.

Artillery shelled parts of Homs for the 13th day in a row. In Damascus, troops swept into the Barzeh district, searching houses and making arrests, witnesses said.

France said it was negotiating a new U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria with Russia, Assad's ally and main arms supplier, and wanted to create humanitarian corridors to ease the plight of civilians caught up in the violence.

"The idea of humanitarian corridors that I previously proposed to allow NGOs to reach the zones where there are scandalous massacres should be discussed at the Security Council," Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on French radio.

He said a U.N. General Assembly vote on Thursday on a non-binding resolution on Syria would be "symbolic." It follows a February 4 veto by Russia and China of a draft Security Council resolution that backed an Arab League call for Assad to quit.

CIVIL WAR

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would listen to Juppe, but added: "If the plan is to use the Security Council and United Nations to adopt some language to help legitimize regime change, then I'm afraid international law does not allow this and we cannot support such an approach."

Lavrov said later on Wednesday: "If leading members of the international community demand regime change as a condition for everything else, then we are convinced ... this is the way to a full civil war with unforeseeable consequences."

Diplomats said Arab delegations had rejected proposed Russian amendments which would weaken the Assembly resolution.

The Arab League wants a joint U.N.-Arab peacekeeping force to be deployed in Syria and has adopted a resolution that would allow its members to arm Syrian rebels.

Libya's interim leader, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, said "our brothers" in the exiled opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) would be allowed to open an office in Tripoli. "We support the Syrian people and their aspirations," he said.

Council members re-elected Burhan Ghalioun as its head at a meeting in the Qatari capital Doha on Wednesday.

The Council is hoping to gain international standing through a "Friends of Syria" meeting on February 24 in Tunisia, which like Libya has seen the overthrow of an authoritarian leader in the last 12 months. Council Secretary General Wael Merza said 74 countries and organizations would be at the meeting.

Western powers are keen to see Assad go but are wary of intervening in a country at the heart of a volatile region.

PROMISES OF DEMOCRACY

The United States, its European allies, Turkey and the Arab League demand that Assad step down.

Syrian state media said on Wednesday a draft constitution to be put to a vote on February 26 would establish a multi-party system in Syria, under Baath Party rule since 1963. 

Parliamentary elections would follow within 90 days of its approval.

It would allow the president to be elected for two terms of seven years. Assad's late father Hafez al-Assad was president for 29 years and was succeeded by his son when he died in 2000.

But new parties could not be based on a religion or regional interests, which appeared to exclude the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood or autonomy-seeking Kurdish parties.
Melhem al-Droubi, a member of the SNC and the Muslim Brotherhood, told Reuters that Assad must resign now.

"The truth is that Bashar al-Assad has increased the killing and slaughter in Syria. He has lost his legitimacy and we aren't interested in his rotten constitutions, old or new," he said.
The United States also dismissed the referendum plan.

"Promises of reforms have been usually followed by increase in brutality and have never been delivered upon by this regime since the beginning of peaceful demonstrations in Syria," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

"The Assad regime's days are numbered."

Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Thomas Countryman said the United States was "deeply concerned" about arms transfers from Iran to Syria.

MISSILES

He said Iran was supplying weapons that could be used against protesters, as was Russia. He added the United States was concerned about the fate of "tens of thousands" of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles Syria is believed to possess.

The Syrian leader dismisses the revolt as the work of terrorists backed by a conspiracy of enemy nations.

Thousands of civilians have been killed since the uprising began in March, inspired by other Arab revolts. The government says it has lost more than 2,000 soldiers and police dead.
Syrian forces battered rebel-held areas on Wednesday, although official media restrictions made it impossible to verify the accounts provided by activists.

In Homs, an explosion hit an oil pipeline feeding a refinery, witnesses said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported two people killed in Homs' Baba Amr district in a new wave of shelling in the evening.

Hundreds of people have been killed in the military's nearly two-week-old bombardment of rebel-held areas of Homs. Activists and aid groups report a growing humanitarian crisis there, with food running short and wounded people unable to get proper care.

The British-based Observatory also said five soldiers were killed in Idlib, near the Turkish border, when a homemade bomb planted by rebels hit an armored vehicle.

Also in Idlib province, two people, one of them a 12-year-old boy, were killed by gunfire from security forces in Sarmin and at least 15 wounded, it said.


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