Nikki Haley, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN holding up pictures of victims of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria which prompted the Trump administration to launch an airstrike against the Assad government. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2017 (IPS)

U.S. President Donald Trump Thursday night described the deepening Syrian refugee crisis as partial justification for the first direct U.S. airstrike against the Syrian government, even though the United States still bans all refugees from Syria.

Several rights groups responded Friday, calling on Trump to repeal the ban, which applies to migrants from Syria and 5 other countries in Africa and the Middle East.

“Trump was using very strong words last night to describe the cruelty and the horrors that children and civilians in general are enduring (in Syria),” Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, co-director of the US Program at Human Rights Watch told IPS.

“To try to keep refugees out of the United States is cruel,”McFarland Sánchez-Moreno added. “It’s contrary to the values that the U.S. has traditionally claimed to hold dear and inconsistent with some of the words that President Trump himself used last night.”

Speaking from Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday night Trump described how “even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered” in the alleged chemical weapons attack which took place earlier this week.

“Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically.  As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize…” Trump continued.

However despite the airstrike marking a change in direction in Syria for the Trump Republican administration, there is no indication the administration is considering a similar shift in its policy towards Syrian refugees.

Reactions from the 15 member states of the UN Security Council to the airstrike on Friday were mixed, with some supporting the strikes even though the United States carried out the unilateral attack without the backing of the council. Others, including Bolivia, which called the meeting, strongly opposed the attack.

Lord Steward Wood of Anfield, Chair of the UN Association of the UK, a civil society organisation questioned the United States decision to take “unilateral action without broad international backing through the UN,”

He said that such action “without a clear strategy for safeguarding civilians, and through further military escalation risks further deepening and exacerbating an already protracted and horrific conflict, leaving civilians at greater, not lesser, risk of further atrocities.”

“In the meantime, if President Trump wishes to help the victims of Assad’s atrocities, he could pledge to play a leading role in resettling the survivors,” Wood added.

Meanwhile Noah Gottschalk, Oxfam America’s Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor called for the United States to “change course” on Syrian refugees following the airstrikes.

Gottschalk said that the “innocent families” that Trump referred to “who were killed in Idlib are no different than the people who are attempting to seek refuge in the U.S.”

“Oxfam is urging the President to change course on his discriminatory ban that blocks Syrian civilians from finding refuge in the United States,” he said. “If we truly want to help protect the people of Syria, we must also be willing to offer the Syrians assistance as they flee attacks in search of safety.”

Although this is the first time that the United States has directly targeted Bashar Al-Assad’s government, airstrike monitoring project Airwars reports that there have been 7912 US-led coalition strikes targeting the so-called Islamic State since 2014. Airwars has also reported a spike in civilian casualties related to coalition air strikes in March 2017, rating 477 civilian casualties reports as ‘fair’.

However Airwars also reported that the U.S. strike on Shayrat Airfield in Homs in the early hours of Friday 7 April destroyed “up to 12 aircraft” describing this result as “significant” considering that “the primary cause of civilian deaths by (the) Syrian regime remains airstrikes.”

Earlier this week spokesmen for the UN Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric said that the Secretary-General was “deeply disturbed by the reports of alleged use of chemical weapons in an airstrike in the Khan Shaykhun area of southern Idlib, Syria.”

“The Secretary-General expresses his heartfelt condolences to victims of the incident and their families.”

Guterres had not yet commented on the U.S. airstrike against the Syrian government as of Friday evening.

Almost five million people have fled Syria since the conflict began over six years ago. Many areas of Syria are besieged and inaccessible to humanitarian assistance as well as UN monitors. This makes it difficult for the UN to monitor attacks such as the alleged chemical weapons attack which took place this week. This is also why the UN no longer provides an official death toll for the conflict, however in April 2016, UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said that it is likely more than 400,000 people had been killed.

The “big five” – i.e., the most military powerful states on earth (US, UK, France, Russia and China) have just agreed that it would be about time to end the Syrian five-year long human tragedy.

Baher Kamal

Before reaching such a conclusion, they waited until 300,000 innocent civilians were killed; tons of bullets shot; 4.5 million humans lost as refugees or homeless at home; hundreds of field testing of state-of-the-art drones made, and daily US, British, French and Russian bombing carried out.

So, with these statistics in hand, they on 18 December 2015 adopted United Nations Resolution 2254 (2015) endorsing a “road map” for peace process in Syria, and even setting a timetable for UN-facilitated talks between the Bashar al Assad regime and “opposition” groups.

They also set the outlines of a “nationwide ceasefire to begin as soon as the parties concerned had taken initial steps towards a political transition.”

“The Syrian people will decide the future of Syria,” the Resolution states.

The UN Security Council also requested that the UN Secretary-General convenes representatives of the Syrian Government and opposition to engage in formal negotiations on a political transition process “on an urgent basis”, with a target of early January for the initiation of talks.

“Free and Fair Elections”

The “big five” then expressed support for a Syrian-led political process facilitated by the United Nations which would establish “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance” within six months and set a schedule and process for the drafting of a new constitution.

Furthermore, the Security Council expressed support for “free and fair elections, pursuant to the new constitution, to be held within 18 months and administered under United Nations supervision,” to the “highest international standards” of transparency and accountability, with all Syrians — including members of the diaspora – eligible to participate.

And they requested that the UN Secretary-General report back on “options” for a ceasefire monitoring, verification and reporting mechanism that it could support within one month. They of course also demanded that “all parties immediately cease attacks against civilians.”

The road-map says that within six months, the process should establish a “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance,” with UN-supervised “free and fair elections” to be held within 18 months.

The whole thing moved so rapidly that the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan di Mestura, has already set the 25 January 2016 as the target date to begin talks between the parties.

All That Is Fine, But…

… But the resolution gives no specific answer to a number of key questions:

To start with, the Syrian National Coalition (SCN) has dismissed the whole idea as “unrealistic,” Deutsch Welle reported. The Coalition objects to a fact that the Security Council’s Resolution carefully “omits”: what future President Assad has.

According to Deutsch Welle, the SNC expressed annoyance that the UN language talked of ISIS terrorism but not of the “terrorism” of the Assad government. Russia has called for the transition to leave the question of governance up to the Syrians, while France and at times the US have demanded Assad’s immediate ousting as a condition of the deal.

If so, which “opposition” should sit to talk with the Syrian regime? While the US, UK and France support what they decided to consider as “rebel” or “opposition” groups, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia would have different criteria.

In this regard, it was decided to work out a mechanism for establishing which rebel groups in Syria will be eligible to take part in the peace process. For this purpose, Jordan, which was tasked with listing terrorist organisations in Syria, has reportedly presented a document that includes up to 160 extremist groups.

Even though, would President Bashar al-Assad be able to run for office in new elections?

How will the UN monitor the requested ceasefires, and control so many different sides involved in the armed fighting, including the US, UK, France and Russia? And what if the ceasefires do not work? More Syrian civilians to die, flee, migrate? How to control DAESH and so many diverse terrorist groups operating there? What to do with those millions of Syrian refugees, scattered in the region, mainly in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, while hundreds of thousands of them are being “trafficked” by organised crime bands, reportedly including DAESH itself?

And last but not least, which Syria will exist at the end of the 18 months which has been fixed as a target to hold free, fair elections?

Will it be the current Syria or a new, refurbished one after cutting part of it to establish a brand new “Sunni-stan” that US neo-con, neo-liberal, Republican “hawk” and former George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has recently recommended to create on the territories to be “liberated” from DAESH in Syria and Iraq?

Too many key questions without and clear answers. And too may gaps for this road-map to gain credibility. Unless the idea is to implement a Libyan-style solution, that’s for another Western-led military coalition, under NATO’s umbrella, to attack Syria, let Assad be murdered, and leave the people to their own fate. Exactly what happened in Libya in 2011.

(End)

The migrants photographed here were being loaded on to a cargo plane in Kufra, located in southeastern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

The military conflicts and political instability driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe were triggered largely by U.S. and Western military interventions for regime change – specifically in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria (a regime change in-the-making).

The United States was provided with strong military support by countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, while the no-fly zone to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was led by France and the UK in 2011 and aided by Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Canada, among others.

“[European leaders] stay silent about the military intervention and regime change in which Europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse.” -- James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum
Last week, an unnamed official of a former Eastern European country, now an integral part of the 28-nation European Union (EU), was constrained to ask: “Why should we provide homes for these refugees when we didn’t invade their countries?”

This reaction could have come from any of the former Soviet bloc countries, including Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Latvia – all of them now members of the EU, which has an open-door policy for transiting migrants and refugees.

The United States was directly involved in regime change in Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003) – and has been providing support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battling a civil war now in its fifth year.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who says he is “horrified and heartbroken” at the loss of lives of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean and Europe, points out that a large majority of people “undertaking these arduous and dangerous journeys are refugees fleeing from places such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS the term “regime change refugees” is an excellent way to change the empty conversation about the refugee crisis.

Obviously, there are many causes, but “regime change” helps focus on a crucial part of the picture, he added.

Official discourse in Europe frames the civil wars and economic turmoil in terms of fanaticism, corruption, dictatorship, economic failures and other causes for which they have no responsibility, Paul said.

“They stay silent about the military intervention and regime change in which Europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse.”

The origins of the refugees make the case clearly: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan are major sources, he pointed out.

Also many refugees come from the Balkans where the wars of the 1990s, again involving European complicity, shredded those societies and led to the present economic and social collapse, he noted.

Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, Connecticut, and the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History, told IPS the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention was dated.

He said the Covenant “was written up for the time of the Cold War – when those who were fleeing the so-called Unfree World were to be welcomed to the Free World”.

He said many Third World states refused this covenant because of the horrid ideology behind it.

“We need a new Covenant,” he said, one that specifically takes into consideration economic refugees (driven by the International Monetary Fund) and political (war) refugees.

At the same time, he said, the international community should also recognize “climate change refugees, regime change refugees and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] refugees.”

The 1951 Convention guarantees refugee status if one “has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

Asked about the Eastern European reaction, Prashad said: “I agree entirely. But of course one didn’t hear such a sentiment from Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and others – who also welcomed refugees in large numbers. Why say, ‘Why should we take [them]?’ Why not say, ‘Why are they [Western Europe and the U.S.] not doing more?’” he asked.

While Western European countries are complaining about the hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding their shores, the numbers are relatively insignificant compared to the 3.5 million Syrian refugees hosted by Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon – none of which invaded any of the countries from where most of the refugees are originating.

Paul told IPS the huge flow of refugees into Europe has created a political crisis in many recipient countries, especially Germany, where neo-Nazi thugs battle police almost daily, while fire-bombings of refugee housing have alarmed the political establishment.

The public have been horrified by refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, deaths in trucks and railway tunnels, thousands of children and families caught on the open seas, facing border fences and mobilized security forces.

Religious leaders call for tolerance, while EU politicians wring their hands and wonder how they can solve the issue with new rules and more money, Paul said.

“But the refugee flow is increasing rapidly, with no end in sight.  Fences cannot contain the desperate multitudes.”

He said a few billion euros in economic assistance to the countries of origin, recently proposed by the Germans, are unlikely to buy away the problem.

“Only a clear understanding of the origins of the crisis can lead to an answer, but European leaders do not want to touch this hot wire and expose their own culpability.”

Paul said some European leaders, the French in particular, are arguing in favour of military intervention in these troubled lands on their periphery as a way of doing something.

Overthrowing Assad appears to be popular among the policy classes in Paris, who choose to ignore how counter-productive their overthrow of Libyan leader Gaddafi was a short time ago, or how counter-productive has been their clandestine support in Syria for the Islamist rebels, he declared.

Paul also said “the aggressive nationalist beast in the rich country establishments is not ready to learn the lesson, or to beware the “blowback” from future interventions.”

“This is why we need to look closely at the ‘regime change’ angle and to mobilize the public understanding that this was a crisis that was largely ‘Made in Europe’ – with the active connivance of Washington, of course,” he declared.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Aboudi, 12, spends his evenings selling flowers outside Beirut's bars. His parents are stuck in his war-torn hometown Aleppo in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2015 (IPS)

In a conflict that has claimed over 220,000 lives and injured a further 840,000 people as of January 2015, it is sometimes hard to see beyond the death toll.

What started as a confrontation between pro-democracy activists and the entrenched dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Syria’s civil war is today one of the world’s most bitter conflicts, involving over four separate armed groups and touching numerous other countries in the region.

“I feel responsible for my family. I feel like I’m still a child and would love to go back to school, but my only option is to work hard to put food on the table for my family." -- Ahmed, a 12-year-old Syrian refugee in Jordan
With millions on the brink of starvation and displaced Syrians now representing the largest refugee population in the world, after Palestinians, scores of lesser-known war-related atrocities are jostling for space in the headlines.

On Jul. 2, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children released a joint report highlighting one of the hidden impacts of the Syrian crisis – a rise in child labour throughout the region.

In a press release issued in Jordan’s capital, Amman, Thursday, the agencies warned, “Syria’s children are paying a heavy price for the world’s failure to put an end to the conflict.

“The report shows that inside Syria, children are now contributing to the family income in more than three quarters of surveyed households, In Jordan, close to half of all Syrian refugee children are now the joint or sole family breadwinners in surveyed households, while in some parts of Lebanon, children as young as six years old are reportedly working.”

“The most vulnerable of all working children are those involved in armed conflict, sexual exploitation and illicit activities including organised begging and child trafficking,” the release stated.

Before the outbreak of war four years ago, Syria was considered a middle-income country, providing its people a decent standard of living and boasting a literacy rate of 90 percent, according to UNICEF data.

By the middle of 2015, however, four in five Syrians were living below the poverty line and 7.6 million were classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs).

With whole cities and towns emptied of residents, businesses and industries have collapsed, sending unemployment rates soaring from 14.9 percent in 2011 to 57.7 percent today.

The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that about 3.3 million people have fled the country altogether and now live in camps or makeshift shelters in neighbouring states. Women and children comprise over half the refugee population.

The vast majority of those who remain inside Syria – over 64.7 percent – are classified as living in “extreme poverty”, unable to meet the most basic food or sanitary needs.

Thus, experts say, it comes as no surprise that children are becoming breadwinners, taking to the streets and selling their labour in a range of industries to help keep their families alive.

As 12-year-old Ahmed, a Syrian refugee in Jordan, pointed out in interviews with UNICEF, “I feel responsible for my family. I feel like I’m still a child and would love to go back to school, but my only option is to work hard to put food on the table for my family.”

Entitled ‘Small Hands, Heavy Burden: How the Syrian Conflict is Driving More Children into the Workforce’, the report notes that an estimated 2.7 million Syrian children are currently out of school.

With few education opportunities and dwindling humanitarian rations, these children now either comprise, or are at risk of joining the ranks of, a veritable army of child workers.

“In Jordan, for example a majority of working children in host communities work six or seven days a week; one-third work more than eight hours a day,” the report noted. “Their daily income is between four and seven dollars.”

Quite aside from representing an irreversible interruption to their education, cognitive development, and – almost certainly – limiting their chances of securing better jobs later in life – the child labour epidemic is harming young people’s bodies.

Save the Children estimates that “Around 75 percent of working children in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan reported health problems; almost 40 percent reported an injury, illness or poor health; and 35.8 percent of children working in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are unable to read or write.”

In this climate of conflict, with the specter of hunger haunting countless families, every industry is considered fair game.

In the Bekaa Valley, for instance, landowners who used to pay a daily wage of 10 dollars to migrant agricultural workers now pay kids four dollars a day, often for performing the same tasks alongside their adult counterparts.

In urban centers, garages, workshops and construction sites are “popular” employers, with 10-year-old Syrian boys hired on a full-time basis to do carpentry, metal work or motor repairs in cities across Lebanon.

Street work represents one of the most dangerous occupations for children, with a recent survey of two major Lebanese cities identifying over 1,500 child street-workers, of whom 73 percent were Syrian refugees.

These kids earn an average of 11 dollars a day, either begging or hawking, while illicit activities like prostitution could earn a small child up to 36 dollars in a single working day.

UNICEF says child labour “represents one of the key challenges to the fulfillment of the ‘No Lost Generation’ initiative”, launched in 2013 with the aim of putting child rights and children’s education at the centre of the humanitarian response to the Syrian crisis.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 4 2015 (IPS)

The ‘West’ is a concept that flourished during the Cold War. Then it was West against East in the form of the Soviet empire. The East was evil against which all democratic countries – read West – were called on to fight.

I recall meeting Elliot Abrams, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State during the Ronald Reagan administration, in 1982. He told me that at the point in history, the real West was the United States, with Europe a wavering ally, not really ready to go up to the point of entering into war with the  Soviet Union.

Roberto Savio

When I tried to explain to him that the East-West denomination dated back to Roman times, long before the United States even existed, he brushed this aside, saying that the contemporary concept was that of those standing against the Soviet Empire, and the United States was the only power willing to do so.

The Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington. The fact that United States had a manifest destiny and was therefore a spokesperson for humankind and the idea that God was American were the bases of his rhetoric.

In one famous declaration, he went so far as asserting that United States was the only democratic country in the world.

After the end of the Cold War, President George W. Bush took up the Reagan rhetoric again. He declared that he was president because of God, which justified his intervention in Iraq, albeit based on false data about weapons of mass destruction (Abrams was also by his side). Now it turns out that he has an indirect responsibility for the creation of the Islamic State (IS).“The [Ronald] Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington”

All this starts in Iraq.  The first governor at the end of the U.S. invasion was retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner who did not last very long because his ideas about how to reconstruct Iraq were considered too lenient. He was replaced by U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer.

Bremer took two fateful decisions: to eliminate the Iraqi army, and to purge all those who were members of the Baath party from the administration, because they were connected to Saddam Hussein. This left thousands of disgruntled officers and a very inefficient administration.

Now we have learned that the mind behind the creation of IS was a former Iraqi colonel from the secret services of the Iraqi Air Force, Samir Abed Al-Kliifawi. The details of how he planned the takeover over of a part of Iraq (and Syria), have been published by Der Spiegel, which came to have access to documents found after his death. They reveal an organisation which is externally fanatic but internally cold and calculating.

After the invasion of Iraq, he was imprisoned by the Americans, and there he connected with several other imprisoned Iraq officers, all of them Sunnis, and started planning the creation of the Islamic State, which now has a number of former Iraqi army officers in its ranks. Without Bremer’s fateful decision, Al-Kliifawi would probably have continued in the Iraqi army.

What we also have to remember here is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was rendered useless by the Cold War, and many saw its demise. However, it was given the war against Serbia as a new reason for existence, and the concept of the West, embodied in a military alliance, was kept alive.

According to a report by scholars with the ‘Costs of War’ project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the terrible cost of the Iraqi invasion had been 2.2 trillion dollars by 2013, not to speak of 190,000 deaths. If we add Afghanistan, we reach the staggering amount of 4 trillion dollars – compared with the annual 6.4 trillion dollar total budget of all 28 members of the European Union – for “resolution” of the conflict.

One would have thought that after that experience, Europe would have desisted from invading Arab countries and aggravating its difficult internal financial balance sheet. Yet, Europe engaged in the destabilisation of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, leading to the explosion of Jihadists from there, 220,000 deaths and five million refugees.

In the case of Libya, under the prodding of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and the United Kingdom’s David Cameron, both for electoral reasons, Europe entered with the aim of eliminating Mu’ammar Gheddafi, then leaving  the country to its destiny. Now thousands of migrants are using Libya in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe and Cameron has decided to ignore any joint European action.

For some reason, Europe always follows United States, without further thinking. The case of Ukraine is the last of those bouts of somnambulism. It has invited Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO, prodding a paranoiac Putin (with the nearly unanimous support of his people), to act to finally stop the ongoing encirclement of the former Soviet republic.

The problem is that Europeans are largely ignorant of the Arab world. A few days ago, Italian police dismantled a Jihadist ring in Bergamo, a town in northern Italy, arresting among others an imam, or preacher, No Italian media took the pain to ascertain which version of Islam he was preaching. All spoke of an Islamic threat, with attacks being planned on the Vatican.

If they had looked with more care, they would have found out that he preached the Wahhabi version of Islam, which is the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia, and which consider all other Muslims as apostates and infidels. This is very similar to IS, which has adopted its Wahhabi version of Islam, but is a far cry from equating Wahhabism with terrorism – all terrorists may be Wahhabis but not all Wahhabis are terrorists.

Saudi Arabia has already spent 87 billion dollars in promoting Wahhabism, has paid for the creation of 1,500 mosques, all staffed with Wahhabi imams, and continues to spend around three billion dollars a year to finance Jihadist groups in Syria, along with the other Gulf countries. This has made Assad an obliged target for the West, and he has succeeded in his claim: better me than chaos, a chaos that he has been also fomenting.

Now the debate is what to do in Libya and NATO is considering several military options. The stroke of luck this time is that U.S. President Barack Obama does not want to intervene. However, with the 28 countries of the European Union increasingly reclaiming their national sovereignty and seldom agreeing on anything, a military intervention is still in the air.

Meanwhile, thousands of refugees try crossing the Mediterranean every day (with the known number of deaths standing at over 20,000 people) to reach Europe, thus strengthening support for Europe’s xenophobic parties which are exploiting popular fear and rejection.

It is a pity that, according to United Nations projections, Europe needs at least an additional 20 million people to continue to be competitive … but this is politically impossible. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

The results of a survey of what 3,500 young people between the ages of 18 and 24 – in all Arab countries except Syria – feel about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa have just been released.

The report of the survey, which was carried out by international polling firm Penn Schoen Berland (PBS), is not a minority report given that 60 percent of the population of the Arab population is under the age of 25, which means 200 million people. Well, the outcome of the survey is that the large majority of them have no trust in democracy.

Roberto Savio

The word democracy does not exist in Arabic, being a concept totally alien to the era in which Muhammad created Islam. However, it is worth noting that the concept of democracy as it is known today is also relatively recent in the West, and we have to wait from its origins in the Greek era for it to make a comeback at the time of the French Revolution.

It became an accepted value just after the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Soviet, Nazi and Japanese regimes.

As a matter of fact, it is still not a reality in large parts of Asia (just think of China and North Korea) and Africa.

Then we have governments, as in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is openly preaching a style of governance à la Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by several of his esteemers, including the National Front party in France, and the Northern League in Italy. But few have such a negative view of democracy as young Arabs.After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent

After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent.

According to the survey, 39 percent of young Arabs agreed with the statement “democracy will never work in the region”, 36 percent thought it would work, while the remaining 25 percent expressed many doubts.

It is clear that the Arab Spring has been betrayed by the return of the army to power as in Egypt, or by the clinging of the old guard to power regardless of the costs, like Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

If you add to this the fact that 41 percent of young Arabs are unemployed (out of a total unemployment figure of 25 percent), and of those 31 percent have completed higher education and 17 percent have graduated from university, it is not difficult to understand that frustration and pessimism are running high among Arab youth.

It also contributes to explaining why so many young people feel attracted to the Islamic State (ISIS) which wants to topple all Arab governments, defined as corrupt and allied to the decadent West, and create a Caliphate as in Muhammad’s times, where wealth will be distributed among all, the dignity of Islam will be enhanced, and a world of purity and vision will substitute the materialistic one of today.

This is why ISIS is attracting youth from all over. Besides, according to experts, for the terrorist to have a geographical space and run it  as a state, where hospitals and schools function and there is a daily life to prove that the dream is possible, represents a great difference with previous terrorist movements like Al-Qaeda, which could only destroy, not really build.

But the survey also reveals something extremely important. To the question “which is the biggest obstacle for the Arab world?”, 37 percent indicated the expansion of ISIS and 32 percent the threat of terrorism. The problem of unemployment was mentioned by 29 percent and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 23 percent.

It is worth noting that the threat of a nuclear Iran was mentioned by only 8 percent (contrary to the declarations of Arab governments), while 17 percent consider that the real problem is the lack of political leaders, while only 15 percent denounce the lack of democracy.

It is important to note that no interviews were carried out in Iran, which is not an Arab country but is a Muslim country. However Iranian Muslims are Shiites and not Sunnis, as in all Arab countries, except for Iraq and Bahrein, and perhaps Yemen, where Shiites are a majority. Of the world’s total Islamic population of 1.6 billion people, Shiites make up only 10 percent.

It is within Sunnite Islam that a dramatic conflict is going on, where Wahabism, a Sunni school born in Saudi Arabia and the official religion of the Saudi reigning house, has now split into those who want to return to the purity of the early times and those are considered “petrowahabists” because they have been corrupted by the wealth created by petrol (they are also called sheikh wahabists because they accept government by sheikhs).

Saudi Arabia has been spending an average of 3 billion dollars a year to promote Wahabism. It has built over 1,500 mosques throughout the world, where radical preachers have been asking the faithful to go back to the real and uncorrupted Islam.

It was with Osama Bin Laden that the Wahabist movement escaped from the control of Saudi Arabia, very much like the radical Hamas movement, originally supported by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Yasser Arafat, turned against the Israeli state. It is not possible to ride radicalism.

The survey also reveals that young Sunnis see ISIS and terrorism as their main threat, but we are talking here of a poll which should represent 200 million people between the ages of 18 and 25. Even if just one percent of them were to succumb to the call of the jihad, we are talking of a potential two million people … and this is now being felt acutely.

The polarisation inside Sunni society (Shiites are not part of that – there are no Shiite terrorists) is felt as the most important problem for the future.

In Europe and the United States, this should be the clearest of examples that ISIS and terrorism are first and foremost an internal problem of Islam and that to intervene in that problem will only unify the Arab world against the invader. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 25 2015 (IPS)

The United Kingdom has been accused of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis – and the accusation comes from no less than the House of Lords, not usually considered a place of critical analysis.

In a scathing report, the upper house of the U.K. parliament has said that the United Kingdom, like the rest of the European Union, has sleepwalked into a very complex problem without looking into the possible consequences, letting bureaucrats taking critical political decisions.

Roberto Savio

It said that it was only when the conflict was well entrenched that political leaders decided to negotiate the Minsk ceasefire agreement, reached by Angela Merkel of Germany, Francois Hollande of France, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, with the notable absence of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

In fact, it was left up to bureaucrats of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to take decisions regarding Ukraine, the same kind of bureaucrats as those appointed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission who, with their usual arrogance, decided the European bailout conceded to Greece where it is widely known that the priority was to refund European (especially German) banks.

The media have a great responsibility in this situation. In all latter day conflicts, from Kosovo to Libya, the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that. Let us be to the point and crisp.“The media have a great responsibility … the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that”

The latest example. All media have been talking of the Iraqi army engaged in taking back the town of Kirkuk from the Caliphate, the Islamic State. But how many are also informing that two-thirds of the Iraqi army is actually made up of soldiers from Iran? And that the Americans engaged in overseeing this offensive are in fact accepting cooperation from Iran, formally an archenemy?

How many have been reporting that the ongoing negotiations over the nuclear capabilities of Iran are really based on the need to restore legitimacy to Iran, because it has become clear that without Iran there is no way to solve Arab conflicts? And how many have informed that all radical Muslims have received financial support from  Saudi  Arabia, which is intent on supporting Salafism, the Muslim school which is at the basis of al-Qaeda and now of the Islamic State?

Recent history shows the West has gone into a number of conflicts (Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012), without looking beyond the immediate consequences, and without any consideration for long-term analysis. The costs of those conflicts have always exceeded the benefits foreseen. An auditor company could not certify any of those conflicts in terms of costs and benefit.

Let us start from the collapse of Yugoslavia, and let us remind ourselves that the West has three principles of international law under which to shield itself as a result of its actions.

One is the principle of inviolability of state borders, which was not applied to Serbia, but is now the case for Ukraine. The second is the principle of self-determination of people, which was used in Kosovo for the Albanian minority living in that part of Serbia but it is not considered valid now for the Russian populations of East Ukraine. The third is the right to intervene for humanitarian interventions, which was used first in Libya, and is now under consideration for Syria.

The drama of the Balkan conflicts was due to a very unilateral action by Germany, which decided to extrapolate Croatia and Slovenia from the Yugoslav federation as its zone of economic interest. The then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, pushed this in an unprecedented way throughout the West.

It was the first time that Germany had play an assertive role, with U.S. support, and it was a Cold War reflex – let us eliminate the only country left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which still inspires itself to a socialist state and not to a market economy.

Serbia, which considered itself heir to the Kingdom of Serbia (out of which Josep Broz Tito had created the socialist Yugoslavia), intervened and a terrible conflict ensued, with civilians paying a dramatic cost.

That conflict renewed dormant ethnic and religious divisions, about which everybody knew, but Genscher, who was then no longer in the German government, explained at a meeting in which the author participated: “I never thought the Serbians would resist Europe.”

It is interesting to note in this context that just a few weeks ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that neither Serbia nor Croatia had engaged in a genocidal war. The news was reported by many media, but without a word of contextualisation.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been destroyed to implement the winning theory of “free market against socialism”. Did the creation of five mini-states improve the lives of the people? Not according to statistics, especially of youth unemployment, which was unknown in the days of Tito.

Then there was Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack in September 2001, the rationale for attacking the country was based on assertions that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was both harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, the group held responsible for the attack, and possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to the United States and its allies. These, which turned out to be lies, were blindly propagated by the media

But if, as is widely believed, petroleum was the cause, let us look at figures as an accounting company would do. That war is estimated to have cost at least two trillion dollars, without considering human life and physical destruction.

Iraq’s annual petroleum output at full pre-war capacity was 3.7 million barrels per day. Now a part of that is under the control of the Islamic State and Kurds have taken more than one-third under their control. But even at the full production, it would have taken more than 20 years to recoup the costs of the war.

It is, to say the least, unlikely that the United States would have had all that time – and since the war, has spent more than a further trillion dollars just in occupation and military costs.

And what about Afghanistan where there is no petroleum? Two trillion dollars have also been spent there … and the aim of that war was just to capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden!

Among others, it was said that democracy would be brought to Afghanistan. Now, after more than 50.000 deaths, nobody speaks any longer of institutional building, and the United States and its allies are simply trying to extricate themselves from a country whose future is bleak.

Now, the question I want to raise here is the following: what has happened to looking beyond the immediate consequences and long-term analysis in foreign policy?

Is it possible that nobody in power questioned the wisdom of an intervention in Libya for example, even assuming that Muammar Gaddafi was a villain to remove?  Did any of them ask what would happen afterwards? Did any of those in power ask what it would mean to support a war to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and what would happen after?

It appears that the House of Lords is right, we are taken into conflict by sleepwalkers. The West is responsible either for creating countries which are not viable (Kosovo), or for disintegrating countries (Yugoslavia and now probably Iraq), or for opening up areas of instability (Libya, Syria).

Without mentioning Ukraine where intervention is aimed at pushing the country towards Europe and NATO, thus provoking the potential retaliation of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Those errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and, altogether, cost at least seven trillion dollars. Who is going to wake the sleepwalkers up? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Ahmad (right), a 19-year-old student of engineering and one of Bab Al-Tabbaneh’s fortunate young people, chatting with a friend. He has been able to go to university, thanks to a grant from the Ruwwad Al Tanmeya NGO. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 10 2015 (IPS)

“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games,” says Mohammad Darwish, a calm man with a curled beard framing his face.

Sitting behind the counter of his cybercafé, located in one of the main streets of the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood in this northern Lebanese city, Darwish says that his young customers have resigned themselves to the persistence of armed conflicts.“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games” – Mohammad Darwish, owner of a cybercafé in the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood of Tripoli

Despite their age, they are pretty sure that clashes – which have become routine here over the past six years – will erupt again sooner or later. Even when calm reigns, the shelled and bullet-riddled buildings in Tabbaneh stand as a reminder of previous clashes.

The last eruption of violence was in late October 2014. Clashes between the army and local Sunni gunmen paralysed Tripoli for three days and destroyed part of the historic old city, leaving at least eight civilians, 11 soldiers and 22 militants dead. The army now controls Tabbaneh, with soldiers and tanks deployed on every street corner.

Curiously, flags and posters of the Islamic State (IS) can be seen displayed in houses and shops.

“I support IS [Islamic State] and the [Al-Qaeda-affiliated] Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN)”, says 19-year-old unemployed Hassan with a smile, explaining that he thinks IS will give him rights “to have a job, to live peacefully according to Islamic precepts, to move freely.”

Tabbaneh is probably the hardest neighbourhood to grow up in the whole of Tripoli. Despite being the second largest city in Lebanon, barely 80 kilometres north of Beirut, policy neglect by various central governments has left this Sunni-majority city suffering from alarming poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, and Tabbaneh is one of its poorest and most marginalised areas.

Seventy-six percent of Tabbaneh inhabitants live below the poverty line, according to a study on ‘Urban Poverty in Tripoli’, published in 2012 by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

These circumstances, aggravated by the political exploitation of sectarianism within a very conservative society, have fuelled the frequent rounds of violence, mainly between Tabbaneh and the neighbourhood of Jabal Mohsen.

A giant poster on a balcony in Bab Al-Tabbaneh in memory of a young boy killed during clashes in the neighbourhood. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

Both neighbourhoods are separated just by one street, but while Bab Al-Tabbaneh inhabitants are mostly Sunni (like the main Syrian rebel groups), most of Jabal Mohsen’s inhabitants are Alawites (the same sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).

This sectarianism has determined a rivalry that dates back to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon which began in 1976 and ended in 2005, but which has turned violent again since 2008, and especially since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011. During the last three years, more than 20 rounds of fights have broken out in Tripoli, most of them between Tabbaneh and Mohsen militias.

“We fight to defend our people, to achieve peace,” says 19-year-old Khaled, who usually works in a bakery but also belongs to a local militia. But Ahmad, who is of the same age, is sceptical: “People fight because they don’t have money or work.”

Ahmad is studying engineering, thanks to a grant provided by Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, a regional NGO that works in the area through youth activism, civic engagement and education. Because his father served in the army, the state paid the major part of his school fees when he was younger and he was able to study in private schools outside Tabbaneh.

Hoda Al-Rifai, a Ruwwad youth officer, agrees with Ahmad: “Many families don’t have incomes. Whenever the conflict starts, the fighters get paid. And these fighters also give money to children to fulfil specific tasks. They can have three dollars a day and this is better than going to school. Their parents also think this way.”

Stereotypes also contribute to make things hard for Tabbaneh’s youth – including finding a job outside the neighbourhood – and shape their personality, explains Hoda. “When we started, the youth had no self-confidence. The media do not produce an image of these neighbourhoods as areas where you can find brilliant young men, willing to study. They just underline the clashes and all kinds of negatives things.”

“There are no members of JN or IS here,” Darwish tells IPS, adding that many in Tabbaneh see the IS flags as a way of showing dissatisfaction over the government’s alleged abandonment of the Sunni community and specifically of Tabbaneh.

“This is not a religious conflict but political. When politicians want to send a message to each other, they pay for clashes here,” adds Darwish’s 49-year-old aunt, veiled and dressed completely in black. “In this city, you can give 20 dollars to a boy so he starts a war,” explains Darwish.

Nevertheless, various studies have found that only a small percentage of the estimated up to 80,000 Tabbaneh inhabitants take part in combats, and Sarah Al-Charif, Lebanon director of Ruwwad, stresses the immediate improvements observed in Tabbaneh and Mohsen youths who participate in the NGO’s projects.

“They become aware of their shared interests, values and pain,” she says. “They became more open-minded, especially the girls.”

For Sarah, in addition to public investment and job opportunities, any solution must include awareness and education, to which Hoda adds: “First of all, citizens need to understand why the clashes take place.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The Harran camp for Syrian refugees was one of the last to be built by the Turkish government in 2012 and is considered the most modern, with a capacity for lodging 14,000 people in 2,000 containers. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
HARRAN and NIZIP, Turkey, Jan 4 2015 (IPS)

“We ran as if we were ants fleeing out of the nest. I moved to three different cities in Syria to try to be away from the conflict, but there was no safe place left in my country so we decided to move out.”

For Professor Helit – who was describing what he called the indiscriminate bombing of cities and burning of civilian houses by the Syrian regime under President Bashar al-Assad when he fled his country two years ago – this “moving out” meant taking refuge across the border in Turkey in one of the so-called “accommodation camps” provided by the Turkish government.

Helit and his 10 children – five daughters and five sons – fled on December 31, 2012, hitch-hiked a lift in a truck to the border with Turkey, and then made their way to the refugee camp in Harran, 20 kilometres from the Syrian border.The Syrians refugees living in Harran have tried to reproduce the lifestyle they had in their homeland, but every family has a sad story to tell – many have lost relatives in the conflict and others still have members in the battlefields fighting the regime

The camp in Harran was one of the last camps to be built by the Turkish government in 2012 and is considered the most modern, with a capacity for lodging 14,000 people in 2,000 containers.

For more than thirty years Helit had been the headmaster of a school in Syria before the outbreak of the armed conflict in Syria in March 2011. He now runs the camp school for 4,700 Syrian children of all ages.

Harran is divided into small neighbourhood-like communities with names such as Peace, Brotherhood and Fraternity, alluding to universal values. Seen from outside, the camp seems like a prison, but the gates of the Harran camp are always open so that families can leave and visit shopping centres nearby.

The Syrians refugees living in Harran have tried to reproduce the lifestyle they had in their homeland, but every family has a sad story to tell – many have lost relatives in the conflict and others still have members in the battlefields fighting the regime.

Professor Helit showed IPS the classrooms and common areas frequented by Syrian students aged between 13 and 16, the walls decorated with paintings by the students which, he said, are an “expression of their feelings and pain.”

“We will never stop fighting for our independence,” he added. “We will resist until the end.”

Stories like that of Professor Helit can be found everywhere in refugee communities along the border, although not all have the “luxury” of container housing.

Syrian children going to school on a cold morning in the tent refugee camp in Nizip, Turkey, near the border with Syria. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

In most camps, like the one in Nizip in the province of Gaziantep – an important industrial city in eastern Turkey – families of up to eight people live in tents.

Nizip lodges 10,700 Arabic Syrians, mostly from Aleppo and Idlib – both towns which were targeted by the al-Nusra Front, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda.

But the Nizip camp is also the setting for an interesting initiative in which its residents are being given the chance of electing their own neighbourhood community representatives. This pioneering initiative is now in its second year.

“This was the first time I ever voted. I don’t understand much about how it works but in Syria there was only one candidate and didn’t matter if we voted or not because the result was already defined”, Mustafa Kerkuz, a 57-year-old Syrian refugee from Aleppo, told IPS.

According to Demir Celal, assistant director of the Nizip camp, this is the first time that Syrians have able to vote freely. “We aim to teach them what a free election looks like,” he said.

The number of Syrian refugees in Turkey now stands at two million, according to Veysel Dalmaz, head of the Prime Ministry’s General Coordination for Syrian Asylum Seekers, who warns that the country has nearly reached full capacity for humanitarian assistance even though Turkey has “an open door-policy in which no one coming from Syria is refused and we do not even discriminate which side they are on.”

So far, the Turkish government has allocated more than five billion dollars to humanitarian aid through the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority of Turkey (AFAD).

According to Dalmaz, there has never in history been a case of mass migration from one country to another in such a short period of time as the migration from Syria to Turkey, and “there is no country that has managed to absorb so many people in so little time.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Oct 21 2014 (IPS)

When Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai adopted the name of Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Husseini al-Quraishi and revealed himself to the world as the Amir al-Mu’minin (the Commander of the Faithful) Caliph Ibrahim of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the whole world had to sit up and take notice of him. 

The choice of the long title that he has chosen for himself is most interesting and symbolic. The title Abu-Bakr clearly refers to the first caliph after Prophet Muhammad’s death, the first of the four “Orthodox Caliphs”.

Farhang Jahanpour

The term Husseini presumably refers to Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson and Imam Ali’s son, who was martyred in Karbala on 13 October 680. His martyrdom is seen as a turning point in the history of Islam and is mourned in elaborate ceremonies by the Shi’ites.

Both Sunnis and Shi’ites regard Imam Hussein as a great martyr, and as someone who gave up his life in order to defend Islam and to stand up against tyranny.

Finally, al-Quraishi refers to Quraish, the tribe to which the Prophet of Islam belonged.

Therefore, his chosen title is full of Islamic symbolism.

According to an alleged biography posted on jihadi Internet forums, al-Baghdadi is a direct descendant of the Prophet, but curiously enough his ancestors come from the Shi’a line of the Imams who descended from the Prophet’s daughter Fatimah.

Despite his great hostility towards the Shi’ites, is this genealogy a way of portraying himself as the true son of the descendants of the Prophet, thus appealing to both Shi’ites and Sunnis?“The decision of some Western governments, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to topple the regime of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad by training and funding Syrian insurgents provided al-Baghdadi with an opportunity to engage in jihad and to widen the circle of his followers, until he suddenly emerged at the head of thousands of jihadi fighters, again attacking Iraq from Syria”

According to the same biography, al-Baghdadi was born near Samarra, in Iraq, in 1971. It is alleged that he received BA, MA and PhD degrees in Islamic studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad. It is also suggested that he was a cleric at the Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal Mosque in Samarra at around the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

According to a senior Afghan security official, al-Baghdadi went to Afghanistan in the late 1990s, where he received his early jihadi training. He lived with the Jordanian militant fighter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Kabul from 1996-2000.

It is likely that al-Baghdadi fled Afghanistan with leading Taliban fighters after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Zarqawi and other militants, perhaps including al-Baghdadi, formed al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In September 2005, Zarqawi declared an all-out war on the Shi’ites in Iraq, after the Iraqi and U.S. offensive on insurgents in the Sunni town of Tal Afar. Zarqawi was killed in a targeted killing by U.S. forces on Jun. 7, 2006.

According to U.S. Department of Defense records, al-Baghdadi was held at Camp Bucca from February until December 2004, but some sources claim that he was interned from 2005 to 2009.

In any case, his history of militancy in both Afghanistan and Iraq and fighting against U.S. forces goes back a long way. He was battle-hardened in the jihad against U.S. forces, and being detained by U.S. forces further strengthened his ambitions and credentials as a militant jihadi fighter.

In the wake of the Arab Spring and anti-government protests in Syria, some Western governments, Saudi Arabia and Turkey decided to topple the regime of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by training and funding Syrian insurgents.

The upheaval in Syria provided al-Baghdadi with an opportunity to engage in jihad and to widen the circle of his followers, until he suddenly emerged at the head of thousands of jihadi fighters, again attacking Iraq from Syria.

His forces conquered vast swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq, and he set up his so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (or greater Syria), ISIS.

On the first Friday in the Muslim month of fasting or Ramadan on Jul, 4, 2014 (American Independence Day), al-Baghdadi suddenly emerged out of the shadows and delivered the sermon at the Great Mosque in Mosul, which had been recently conquered by ISIS.

His sermon showed not only his command of Koranic verses, but also his ability to speak clearly and eloquently. He is certainly more steeped in radical Sunni theology than any of the al-Qaeda leaders, past and present, ever were.

His biographer says that Al-Baghdadi “purged vast areas in Iraq and Syria from the filth of the Safavids [a term referring to the 16^th century Iranian Shi’ite dynasty of the Safavids], the Nusayris [a derogatory term referring to the Syrian Alawite Shi’ites], and the apostate [Sunni] Awakening Councils. He established the rule of Islam.”

In his short sermon, al-Baghdadi denounced those who did not follow his strict interpretation of Islam as being guilty of bid’a or heresy. He quoted many verses from the Koran about the need to mobilise and to fight against non-believers, and to remain steadfast in God’s path.

He also stressed some key concepts, such as piety and performing religious rituals, obeying God’s commandments, and God’s promise to bring victory to the downtrodden and the oppressed. Finally, he talked about the need for establishing a caliphate.

In the Koranic context, these terms have broad meanings. However, in the hands of al-Baghdadi and other militant jihadis, these terms are given completely different and menacing meanings, calling for jihad and the subjugation of the non-believers.

The views and actions of al-Baghdadi and his followers are almost an exact copy of the Wahhabi revivalist movement instigated by an 18^th century theologian from Najd in the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792).

Indeed, what we are seeing in Iraq now is almost the exact repetition of the violent Sunni uprising in Arabian deserts that led to the establishment of the Wahhabi state founded by the Al Saud clan almost exactly 200 years ago.

In 1802, after having seized control of most of Arabian Peninsula, the Saudi warlord Abdulaziz attacked Karbala in Iraq, killed the majority of its inhabitants, destroyed the shrine of Imam Hussein, where Prophet Muhammad’s grandson is buried, and his followers plundered everything that they could lay their hands on.

The establishment of that dynasty has resulted in the propagation of the most fundamentalist form of Islam in its long history, which eventually gave rise to Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and now to ISIS and al-Baghdadi.

The jihadis reduce the entire rich and varied scope of Islamic civilisation, Islamic philosophy, Islamic literature, Islamic mysticism, jurisprudence, Kalam and tafsir (hermeneutics) to the Shari’a, and even at that, they present a very narrow and dogmatic view of the Shari’a that is rejected by the greatest minds in Islam, putting it above everything else, including their rationality.

Indeed, it is a travesty that such barbaric terrorist acts are attributed to Islam. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

What remains of a street in Aleppo, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

The woman who walked into the Islamic Front (IF) media office near the Turkish border was on the verge of fainting under the hot Syrian sun, but all she cared about was her infant son.

With over half of the country’s population displaced, she was just one of the parents among the more than three million UN-registered Syrian refugees grappling with how to keep their children safe and healthy while dealing with the innumerable dangers inherent in war zones, refugee camps and statelessness.

When IPS met the young woman in early August, she was living in the nearby Bab Al-Salama camp in northern Syria after having been displaced from an area of heavy fighting.Over 200,000 Syrians are living outside the camps in Gaziantep and rent prices have roughly tripled since the massive influx of refugees starting. Protests broke out in mid-August against their presence, and they are increasingly being targeted by violence.

The infant was only a few weeks old and needed to be breastfed, but there was nowhere out of the sight of men. And so, wearing a stifling niqab, she asked to use the room that now serves to ‘register’ foreign journalists crossing the border.

The room afforded some shade and privacy in which to breastfeed and, once the twenty-two-year-old former fighter in charge of the office had stepped out, she started feeding her child.

As she blew gently his sweaty forehead, the woman told IPS that she had kidney problems and could not sit – she could only lie down or stand up. She said that she was also having problems accessing medical care, for both herself and her feverish son. And even if the black abaya covering her body and the niqab over her face were hot, ‘’it’s better to use them,’’ she said, ‘’it’s war”.

The area around the Bab Al-Salama camp just across the border from the Turkish town of Kilis has been bombed several times, including a car bomb in May that killed dozens.

On the other side of the border, the camps that the Turkish government has set up for the over 800,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations are said to be able to accommodate fewer than 300,000 of them.

In formal and informal refugee camps throughout the world, women are notoriously at risk of sexual crimes. Alongside economic issues, many parents on both sides of the border cite this as a reason to marry off their daughters earlier, in the attempt to ‘’protect their honour’’ and find someone to provide for them.

The children resulting from these unions are almost always unable to be registered and are thus stateless, joining the ranks of the many Syrian Kurds and others denied citizenship under Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.

Mohamed was an officer in the Syrian regime’s army. From a fairly large tribe in Idlib, his family was targeted by the regime once the conflict began and he has fought with different Free Syrian Army brigades over the past few years.

Soon after a number of women were reportedly raped by ’shabiha’ in his area, he moved his young wife, mother and sisters across the border. He now crosses illegally into Turkey to see them when not fighting.

Street scene in rebel-held Aleppo, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

Mohamed is seeking ways to reach Europe. When IPS first met him in autumn of 2013, he had no intention of leaving. However, since then, his first son has been born, stateless.  The Syrian regime did not issue passports to officers in order to prevent them from defecting even prior to the 2011 uprising, and none of his family possesses one.

As a professional soldier without a salary and with no moderate rebel groups providing adequate wages to support a family, as well as no desire to join extremist groups – many of which would pay better – he feels does not know how else he can provide for his family.

‘’There’ s no future here,’’ he said.

On the Turkish side of the border, Ahmad – originally from Aleppo, Syria’s industrial capital – says he does not want to leave the region.

“I once asked my wife what country in the world she would go to if she could, and she answered ‘Syria’,’’ he told IPS proudly.

However, he added that he had stopped going backwards and forwards as a fixer and media activist as the day approached for his wife to give birth and the situation in Aleppo worsened.

When children approached a table as IPS was having tea with him in a Turkish border town, he somewhat gruffly told a little girl begging that she should ‘’work, even if that means selling packets of tissues on the streets.’’

‘’They have to learn to work and not just ask for money. Turks are starting to get angry that we are here,’’ he said.

Over 200,000 Syrians are living outside the camps in Gaziantep and rent prices have roughly tripled since the massive influx of refugees starting. Protests broke out in mid-August against their presence, and they are increasingly being targeted by violence.

Meanwhile, some attempts are being made to raise money for schools inside Syria that would be virtual ‘bunkers’, as Assad’s regime continues to target both schools and medical facilities.

In rebel-held Aleppo, IPS stayed with a Syrian family for a number of days in August as the regime barrel bombing campaign continued and as the danger of an impending siege by government forces or a takeover by the extremist Islamic State (IS) became more likely.

The eldest of the family’s four girls – only eight-years-old – had recently been hit by a sniper’s bullet while crossing the road to one of the few schools still functioning. Although it was healing, the exit wound will leave a very ugly scar on her arm.

Whenever the bombs fell during the night, the occupants of the room would move about restlessly, while the eight-year-old was always already awake, staring into the dark, utterly motionless.

Her father was adamant, however, that – come what may – the family would not leave.

In the late afternoon, little boys could be seen playing outside in the street with scant protection from snipers, only the nylon tarp of a former UNHCR tent hung across the street in an attempt to shield them. Large gaping holes marked the buildings, or what was left of them, in the street around them.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

President Barack Obama meets with National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice and Tony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor, in the Oval Office, Aug. 1, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 2014 (IPS)

This week’s video-taped beheading of a U.S. journalist by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has spurred renewed calls for President Barack Obama to broaden Washington’s military efforts to strike the terrorist group, including in Syria.

While Obama himself has long resisted pressure from neo-conservatives and other hawks to intervene more directly in Syria’s civil war, senior administration officials suggested strongly in the wake of ISIS’s grisly execution of James Foley that expanding U.S. military intervention across the border was indeed on the table.The administration’s strategy will depend on co-operation from Sunni-led Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, which have withheld support from Iraq under Maliki.

The most pointed remark in that regard came from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who until now has been considered one of the strongest opponents of any expanded U.S. military role in the region, particularly in Syria where ISIS has emerged as the strongest among the rebel groups fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“To your question, can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organisation which resides in Syria,” Dempsey said in answer to a reporter’s question, “the answer is no. That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a non-existent border.”

Asked whether the Pentagon was indeed considering striking ISIS in Syria, Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, who described the group’s potency as “beyond anything that we have seen” and a “long-term threat” to the U.S., said simply, “We’re looking at all options.”

Similarly, in a briefing with reporters in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Obama is currently vacationing, his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes echoed that position.

“We’re actively considering what is necessary to deal with that threat, and we’re not going to be restricted by borders,” he said, noting that the beheading was considered by the administration to constitute a “terrorist attack against our country. …If you come after Americans, we’re going to come after you wherever you are.”

The tougher line on ISIS, whose sweep from bases in eastern Syria and al-Anbar province in western Iraq through much of northern and central Iraq in June and subsequent advances into Kurdish-controlled territory earlier this month stunned officials here, comes in the wake of some progress by the administration in addressing the crisis.

On the military front, the nearly 100 U.S. airstrikes, which were carried out over the past week in co-ordination with Kurdish pesh merga and U.S.-trained Iraqi special forces, appear to have succeeded in pushing back ISIS forces from much territory they had gained in the Kurdish region and in depriving the militants of their control of the huge Mosul dam.

On the political front, the resignation of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his replacement by Haider al-Abadi broke a long-standing deadlock in Baghdad and, at least theoretically, opened the door to the formation of a less sectarian government in which the minority Sunni and Kurdish communities will gain a real share of power.

The administration clearly hopes that such an outcome will persuade many Sunnis – including mainly secular former Baathist officials and military officers – who have been allied with ISIS in the latter’s campaign against Maliki to break the militants, much as they did against ISIS’s predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), during the so-called “Anbar Awakening” movement in 2006-7.

“Baathists want the ouster of Maliki to regain some of the stature and political participation that they’ve been denied since the fall of Saddam Hussein,” Human Rights Watch Iraq specialist Letta Tayler told foreignpolicy.com. “And that’s a very different goal from setting up a caliphate…”

Of course, the likelihood that such an outcome can be achieved will depend heavily on the cooperation – or at least acquiescence – of other key external players besides the U.S., of which Iran is considered the most important given its influence with the various Shia parties that have dominated Iraq’s government since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

In addition to Iran, however, the administration’s strategy will depend on co-operation from Sunni-led Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, which have withheld support from Iraq under Maliki and largely failed to vigorously enforce laws and international sanctions against those of its citizens who have provided financial and other support to Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and, more recently, ISIS.

Washington has been encouraged by the favourable reaction to Abadi’s appointment from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — who, like Jordan’s king, appears increasingly alarmed by ISIS’s expansion — and hopes it will be followed by efforts to persuade key Sunni tribes in Iraq to break with the militants and participate in a new government in Baghdad.

Much the same approach applies to its strategy against ISIS in Syria, where it faces a much trickier situation given U.S. opposition to the Assad regime, whose forces, however, are increasingly seen here as the only significant barrier to ISIS’s expansion there.

Western-backed “moderate” rebels of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have steadily lost ground to both government forces and to ISIS, as well as other “jihadi” groups, over the past year and have become increasingly marginal to the conflict.

While Obama last month pledged 500 million dollars in new assistance, including military aid, for the FSA to fight both the regime and the jihadi groups, officials have said the vetting and training of new fighters will take many months to complete and, even then, is unlikely to be able to be able to tilt the battlefield in any substantial way for the foreseeable future, if at all.

Thus, the primary battlefield beneficiary of U.S. strikes against ISIS in Syria is likely to be Assad, a prospect that cannot please Sunni-led allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which, despite their new concerns about the threat posed by ISIS, have invested heavily in the Syrian president’s ouster.

Nonetheless, the administration is likely to push hard on its allies to co-operate in weakening ISIS in Syria, as well as Iraq, mainly by cutting off private external funding of the group and sealing porous borders that have been used to infiltrate ISIS fighters and recruits into Syria.

To gain their co-operation, Obama may have to offer key concessions, such as accelerating aid and supplying more advanced weaponry to non-jihadi groups, and supplying additional guarantees to Gulf states that feel threatened by any rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.

To defeat ISIS, according to Dempsey, military means will not be sufficient. “(It) will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time.

“It requires a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is airstrikes,” he said. “I’m not predicting those will occur in Syria, at least not by the United States of America. But it requires the application of all the tools of national power – diplomatic, economic, information, military.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

In contrast to some of their leaders, people across the Arab world prefer President Barack Obama’s efforts to reduce Washington’s military footprint in the Middle East to the approach favoured by neo-conservatives and other U.S. hawks, according to the latest in a series of surveys of Arab public opinion released here Tuesday.

While the popular perception of U.S. policies in the region remains largely negative, the survey, which included six Arab countries and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, found a notable increase in Arab support for Obama compared to three years ago, as well as strong majorities who said that having “good relations with the United States” was important to their country.

Overall, Arab attitudes toward the U.S. are back roughly to where they were in 2009 shortly after Obama took office, according to James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute (AAI) and director of Zogby Research Services, which conducted the poll.

Obama’s accession ended the eight-year reign of President George W. Bush (2001-2009), whose military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and nearly unconditional support for Israel brought U.S. favourability ratings in the region down to the single digits in most countries.

Among other findings, the poll found that Bush evoked the most negative views by far of the last four U.S. presidents in six of the seven countries covered by the survey.

“Overall, my takeaway is an uptick [for Obama and the United States],” Zogby told a forum at the Middle East Institute (MEI) where the survey results and an accompanying analysis, ‘Five Years After the Cairo Speech: How Arabs View President Obama and America’, were released.

The main lesson to be learned from the increase in positive sentiment toward Obama and the U.S., he suggested, was “the less damage you do, the better off you are.”

He cited the fact that Washington’s withdrawal from Iraq and its negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear programme were considered by respondents in all of the countries except Lebanon to be the two “most effective” efforts by the administration to address the challenges it faces in the Arab world.

The survey, which was based on interviews last month of representative samples (800-1,000 in each country) of respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as Palestine, produced a number of notable findings on a variety of other issues, several of which appeared to support Zogby’s observation.

Despite the repeated insistence by a number of Arab leaders – as well as Obama’s hawkish critics here – that the U.S. should do more militarily to oust Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, significant majorities in all surveyed countries opposed any form of U.S. military engagement, including establishing “no-fly zones,” carrying out air strikes, or even supplying more advanced weapons to rebel forces.

Given a menu of six policy options for the U.S. to pursue in the three-year-old civil war in Syria from which they were asked to choose two, majorities ranging from 51 percent (UAE) to 82 percent (Morocco) in all seven countries opted for providing humanitarian relief to refugees.

Seven in ten Moroccan and Lebanese respondents chose “leave Syria alone”, as did 54 percent of Jordanians. The next most-popular option in the remaining countries – but most popular in Egypt – was “pressing the parties” to negotiate a transitional government.

The new survey found virtually no support for direct U.S. military intervention in any country, despite the fact that a just-released poll by the Pew Research Center showed that between six and seven out of ten respondents in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia hold a “very negative view” of Assad.

Nonetheless, the anti-Assad sentiment “doesn’t translate into Arabs wanting the United States to intervene directly or even provide aid to [the rebels],” said Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here. “If I were an Obama adviser, I would use this poll to say that we [have been] right.”

In another blow to U.S. hawks, especially neo-conservatives who have urged a more muscular policy against Syria and Iran, the new poll found that the civil war in Syria has not displaced the Israel-Palestine conflict as the most pressing concern among Arab publics about U.S. policy.

Asked to choose from seven options that they considered the most important challenges for U.S.-Arab relations, pluralities and majorities ranging from 45 percent (Saudi Arabia) to 76 percent (Morocco) cited Israel-Palestine in six of the seven countries. Only in the UAE was the war in Syria considered by a plurality to be more important.

Remarkably, ending Iran’s nuclear programme was among the least-chosen options, even in Saudi Arabia and the UAE whose governments have been the most hawkish toward Tehran.

Similarly, asked to choose the single greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East among six options, pluralities and majorities in all but the UAE cited the “continuing occupation of Palestinian lands”.

The next most-frequently chosen option was “U.S. interference in the Arab world” – far ahead of the least-chosen option in six of the seven countries, “Iran’s interference in Arab affairs”. The UAE was again the only exception: 16 percent of respondents there cited Iran’s interference; that was still six percent fewer respondents than those who cited “U.S. interference”.

While Iran and its nuclear programme were not seen as particularly threatening by majorities in the seven Arab countries, Tehran’s favourability ratings continued their sharp decline since 2006, when its support for Hezbollah during the war with Israel and defiance of the U.S. gained it strong backing throughout the Arab world.

While a majority in Lebanon (81 percent) and a 50-percent plurality in Palestine view Iran favourably today, fewer than a quarter of respondents in the other five countries said they saw Iran in a generally positive light. Only one percent of Saudi respondents said so.

Muasher suggested two main factors appeared to contribute to the disillusionment; the repression that followed the disputed 2009 presidential elections and, more important, Iran’s backing for Assad in Syria.

One of the new survey’s most notable findings dealt with U.S. policy toward Egypt and the changes of government there over the past three years, according to Zogby. Asked whether the U.S. was “too supportive, not supportive enough, or just right” toward each government, majorities in all countries except Palestine said Washington was “too supportive” of Hosni Mubarak.

Perhaps more surprising, pluralities and majorities in five of the seven countries – including 61 percent in Egypt itself – said Washington was “not supportive enough” of Mohammed Morsi’s presidency.

The exceptions were Lebanon and UAE, which, along with Saudi Arabia, has been the interim government’s biggest financial supporter since the military coup that ousted Morsi. Even in Saudi Arabia, which has led the counter-revolution against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood across the region, a 44-percent plurality said Washington had not given Morsi enough support.

While Arabs remain highly critical of U.S. policies in the region, there has been an increase in Arab support for Obama in all seven countries since 2011, the year when he ceased insisting on an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank and when the hopes raised by his inauguration and subsequent speech in Cairo in which he pledged improved relations with the Arab world collapsed across the region.

At that time, ten percent or fewer of respondents in each country said they supported Obama’s policies. In 2014, that support increased ten-fold in Egypt (to 34 percent), eight-fold in Jordan (to 25 percent), nearly five-fold in UAE (to 38 percent), about three-fold in Morocco and Saudi Arabia (to 28 percent and 34 percent, respectively).

Favourability ratings for the United States have also improved over the last three years, although they have lagged behind Obama’s, according to the survey.

A wall mural in Damascus "to send a message to the world that we Syrians love life," says the lead artist, Moaffak Makhoul. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

By Eva Bartlett
DAMASCUS, May 12 2014 (IPS)

On a weekday afternoon, the Old City of Damascus heaves with people, cars, motorcycles, bikes. Markets are crowded with locals bartering with merchants for the heaps of spices, flowery perfumes, clothing, and most things one needs, abundant in the Hamidiyah market.

At the end of the historic Roman Via Recta (Straight Street), boys play football amidst ancient columns.

Syria, in its fourth year of a devastating foreign-backed armed attempt to overthrow the government, is somehow still pulsing with life and hope.

In the narrow back lanes of the Old City, couples walk hand in hand, older men greet each other with broad smiles and a kiss on each cheek. Music wafts from open doors of ancient homes, their courtyards bursting with greenery. A milkman delivers milk from large tins strapped to his bicycle.

But the spacious old homes converted into hotels or restaurants now have no tourists. Various shop owners highlight the same issue: they have goods, but no buyers.

Bassam runs his family’s antiques and jewellery store, Giovanni, near the East Gate entrance to the Old City, in an old Damascene home with vast arches and ornate wooden décor.

“Business is not very good, because of the situation. Many people used to come here.” He picks up a framed photo of himself and a woman in his store. “That’s Catherine Deneuve, a French actress. She’s very famous,” he says, reiterating that well-known people from around the world used to frequent his store.

Inside the Umayyad Mosque, worshipers pray and relax in the cool interior, a boy twirls Sufi-style through the mosque. Outside, women sit in the courtyard shade with their children, picnicking on sandwiches.

The vast square opposite the mosque is filled with food vendors, clothing vendors, families milling about, kids selling roses. Children gather around a hoard of pigeons, buying feed to toss to them.

A popcorn vendor in his 20s says things are improving in Syria. “Life here is good, things have gotten back to normal, the government supports us. But my house is in Babbila, just outside of Damascus. I can’t go back there, the ‘rebels’ have taken over.”

Almost daily, armed groups launch mortars on civilian areas in Damascus, from villages on the outskirts like Jobar, Mliha. On Apr. 15, mortars struck Manar elementary school, killing one child and injuring 62 others. A kindergarten was also shelled that morning, in the same densely-inhabited area of Damascus, injuring three more children.

On Apr. 29, the mortars struck Bader Eddin al-Hassni Institute for religious science, killing 14 students and injuring 86 others, according to SANA news.

As I sit outside the old city walls one afternoon, roughly one hundred metres from East Gate, bullets whiz closely past, coming from the direction of Jobar, an area controlled by armed groups.

Al-Midan, a district of Damascus known for its traditional Syrian sweets, still receives local business but faces the same loss of foreign customers as most in the tourism industry. “I used to bring delegations here specifically for the sweets,” says Anas, a journalist with Syrian television. “But as you see there are no tourists here now.”

Nagham, a university student, says even many local Syrians won’t go to Midan now. “People are afraid to come here now, because it’s so close to Yarmouk. Midan is safe, but people think that the ‘terrorists’ in Yarmouk will fire mortars here.”

Due to attacks on civilians, including car bombings, checkpoints are installed throughout Damascus and the countryside, causing long lines of traffic as soldiers check vehicles for explosives. But without the checkpoints, there would be more loss of civilian life.

Homs residents know all too well the deadly effects of the car bombings. On Apr. 9, for example, two car bombs detonated one after the other on the same residential street, killing 25 civilians and injuring at least 107, according to Syrian state media. On Apr. 29, two more car bombs and a rocket attack killed another 42 civilians in Homs.

But Homs is also a place where the reconciliation movement has taken flight, with fighters nearly daily laying down their weapons and opting for a political solution for Syria.

In Latakia, a coastal city roughly 350 km northwest of Damascus, near the Turkish border, internally displaced Syrians from the Armenian populated village of Kasab take refuge in an Armenian Orthodox Church.

On Mar. 21, armed groups began firing missiles from nearby Turkey upon the village, later entering and taking it over, committing atrocities against the civilians. Eighty people are reported to have been killed, and nearly 2000 villagers fled to Latakia and other areas to escape the attacks by a reported 1500 Chechnyan and other foreign, al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents, backed by Turkish special forces.

“They can destroy our houses, but we’re going back. We believe in the Syrian Arab Army,” said Suzy, from Kasab, who described some of the atrocities committed. “They raped the older women, because they couldn’t find girls, so they raped the elderly. They destroyed everything, they robbed our houses, they broke the statue of the Virgin Mary.”

When asked her sentiments on Syria’s president, she replied without hesitation, like so many in Syria. “We have a leader, Dr. Bashar Al-Assad. We love him so much, we don’t want anything else. We want him, we want Syria back.”

Elsewhere in Latakia, a city secured by the Syrian army but attacked from a distance with missiles, children and teens play in a fountain in a large, clean park, and men and women sit smoking shisha or hookah and chatting.

Fadia, an unveiled Sunni Muslim, sitting with a group of veiled and unveiled women, says that internally Latakia does not have serious problems. “Life is good here, we’re living happily, the army have protected us here. We love our president, our army, our country, but the outside forces want to destroy the country. There is no problem between Christians, Muslims, Armenians, Alawites here. We are all one family, no one can split us apart.”

This is a point Lilly Martin, who is from California but has lived in Syria for the past 22 years, drives home.

“At the beginning, we had a surge of violence, protestors attacking Syrian police and security, but right away the Latakian people turned against it. The population here didn’t accept it. We have Christians, Muslims, and minorities here. There is very little support for the ‘rebels’ here, so it’s been a peaceful city,” she says.

In Homs, Latakia, Damascus, walls and shop doors are decorated with large, painted replicas of the Syrian flag and posters of President Assad. Syrian flags appeared at Easter celebrations, wedding receptions and engagement parties. And along with the flags, there are patriotic songs for Syria and President Assad, with a roomful of celebrants singing along, hooting and clapping.

On the Autostrad, the main street leading to the al-Mezze district of Damascus, a block-long mural brightens the otherwise standard wall surrounding a school. The colourful mosaic of scraps of tiles and recycled items is the project of six artists. Moaffak Makhoul, the lead artist, explains the concept.

“We did this for the children, to bring a smile to their faces. And we wanted to send a message to the world that we Syrians love life, and that we insist on living, on surviving,” he says.

His message also has an important political element to it. “To those who espouse the ideology that wants to eliminate others, the Takfiri ideology, we tell them ‘no’.”

Four youths in their late teens stop to talk. “We were living well, with security, before this happened. We were living in freedom. Now we’re not,” says Rehab, one of the girls. “Now you don’t know who is a terrorist. We just want our country to return to how it was.”

Ramez, another one of the teenagers, says things are better now, “life is improving.” Batoul, the other girl, adds “We love Bashar. He’s a good person. We know what he has done to improve the country. And before any of these things began, we were living well, safely.”

Bassam, in his lonely East Gate store, is also optimistic. “Peace is coming sooner or later – no, sooner. Damascus is a wonderful city. And the people are wonderful too.”

The call to prayer sounds, church bells ring out, in a city and country where life goes on despite it all.

Despite an atmosphere of deep mutual distrust, two major rival Syrian Kurdish bodies have agreed to attend an expected international conference on the fate of Syria, known as Geneva II, on the side of the Syrian opposition forces, Syrian Kurdish sources told IPS.

That is contingent on the possibility that only two sides will be allowed to sit at the negotiating table: the government of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition groups.

Although the decision represents a significant change of direction on the part of the deeply-divided Syrian Kurds, there are serious doubts as to whether the agreement between the Western Kurdistan People’s Council (WKPC) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC) will actually be implemented.

While the WKPC is perceived to have some sort of understanding with Assad’s regime, the KNC is close to the rest of the Syrian opposition groups.

The Geneva II conference, scheduled to be held on Jan. 22, is backed by the western powers, Russia, the United Nations and the Arab League.

The international community hopes that the conference will pave the way for an interim government and end the bloody conflict in Syria that has claimed over 100,000 lives so far, according to U.N. figures.

There is no concrete agreement yet on whether Syrians will take part in the conference in the form of two or more negotiating groups.

But if there will be more than two Syrian sides at the Geneva II conference, then Kurds will seek to participate as a separate independent bloc, IPS has learned from Syrian Kurdish sources.

“Geneva II is an important station where the future of Syria will be determined,” Abdulsalam Ahmed, the co-chairperson of the WKPC, told IPS.

He was in Erbil for eight days of intense talks with KNC representatives over participation in the Geneva conference and a possible power-sharing deal between the two Kurdish bodies to administer the Kurdish territories of Syria.

The WKPC is close to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose military wing, known as the People’s Defence Units (YPG), controls much of the Kurdish areas in the northern and northeastern parts of Syria.

“As Kurds we are an important actor on the ground and need to be represented,” added Ahmed, who warned that the Syrian crisis cannot be resolved until the Kurdish question is addressed.

For Kurds, the Geneva II conference bears more significance than merely an attempt to end Syria’s civil war, which they have largely managed to avoid getting involved in.

It has resurrected memories of rather similar international gatherings in France’s Sevres and Switzerland’s Lausanne at the turn of the last century that brought about disastrous results for Kurds and subjugated them to the harsh rule of governments in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

“Geneva II, as an international gathering, is a new Sevres [Treaty in 1920 in France] and Sykes-Picot [treaty], and we cannot afford to be absent from that meeting,” said Nuri Brimo, a leading official of the KNC, much of whose senior leadership is based outside Syria, mostly in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sykes-Picot was a treaty between Britain and France to draw the map of the new Middle East after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.

“Syria will either survive as a united country or be further fragmented after the conference… In any case, we will have to be present there,” added Brimo.

“Our message to the international community is that we as the second-largest ethnicity in Syria want our rights to be recognised… We don’t want Syria to be fragmented. We need to be a major player in the Syrian equation and the country’s future.”

Syria’s Kurdish politics

The Kurdish political scene in Syria is deeply fragmented and highly complex. The WKPC and KNC each represent a number of often loosely-allied groups. The two bodies have been at odds with each other since the start of the Syrian uprising nearly three years ago and often trade harsh accusations over the other side’s loyalties and agenda.

The KNC charges that the WKPC and its major component, PYD, have struck a deal with Assad’s government and as such have betrayed the opposition’s cause of toppling Assad.

Until the March 2011 uprising, the Assad regime denied Syrian Kurds basic cultural and ethnic rights, and tens of thousands of them were even denied citizenship.

The root of suspicions toward the PYD lies in the manner of its military takeover of the Kurdish areas of Syria in the summer of 2012.

While the PYD and its supporters claim they “liberated” those areas following military confrontations with the Syrian army and security forces, the KNC and Syrian opposition groups say Assad handed over control of those areas to the PYD in order to use his troops to fight rebel groups in other parts of the country.

They argue that as Turkey’s support for Syrian rebel groups, including Islamists, increased, Assad conceded de facto control of much of the Syrian Kurdish regions to the PYD in an effort to counterbalance Turkish intervention in Syrian affairs.

The PYD is widely seen as close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, that has been fighting the Turkish government for Kurdish rights for around three decades.

PYD and WKPC supporters, on the other hand, are quick to point out that the KNC is close to the Sunni-Arab dominated Syrian opposition groups, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurdistan’s President Masoud Barzani.

The non-Kurdish Syrian opposition groups are largely loath to state their position vis-à-vis Kurdish rights in the future Syria.

The PYD also accuses the KNC of advancing the agendas of Barzani and Turkey and not the genuine interests of Syrian Kurds.

This state of deep divisions and mistrust that has overshadowed the intra-Syrian Kurdish relations has led many Syrian Kurds not to place much hope on any deal between the WKPC and the KNC.

In the past, small skirmishes have taken place between PYD forces and supporters of parties within the KNC ranks, resulting in some casualties.

“The situation [after the recent Erbil talks] is going to be like before. The conflict between them [i.e. PYD and KNC] continues,” said Siruan H. Hussein, a Syrian Kurdish journalist and director of ARTA FM, a community radio station based in the predominantly Kurdish town of Amuda in Syria.

“The PYD is not going to share military power and financial resources and… control of the self-rule administration with the KNC.”

The PYD recently declared the establishment of an autonomous administration to manage the areas under its control.

Despite the rising fortunes of al-Qaeda-allied Islamist forces in Syria, the PYD has successfully battled those groups and wrestled control of chunks of territory from them.
As many parts of Syria have experienced heavy devastation as a result of the conflict there, PYD-controlled areas have been spared much of the destruction.

Syrian refugees in Boynuyogun refugee camp in Hatay, Turkey shout Islamic slogans against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in March 2012. Credit: Freedom House/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 20 2013 (IPS)

Three months after averting a military strike against Syria with a last-minute deal to deprive it of its chemical weapons arsenal, U.S. policy toward the world’s most violent conflict appears increasingly at sea.

The weakening of Washington’s favoured rebel faction, dramatically illustrated earlier this month by the Saudi-backed Islamic Front’s takeover of the main headquarters and warehouses of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) along the Turkish border, has deprived it of a viable secular force in the armed struggle against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

At the same time, U.S. efforts to persuade the newly formed Front, whose factions have worked closely with Al-Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria, even as they deny any such association, to return the purloined equipment to the FSA, let alone take part in the Geneva II peace talks scheduled for Jan. 22, 2014 with the government, appear to have been rebuffed.

“The Islamic Front has refused to sit with us, without giving any reason,” Washington’s special envoy on Syria, Robert Ford, said in an interview with al-Arabiya television earlier this week."America is paralysed...because they can't support Assad, but they won't support these radical Islamists either."
-- Joshua Landis

The result, according to analysts here, is that the Jan. 22 conference, if it takes place at all, is unlikely to affect the situation on the ground where the war consists increasingly of two extremes, neither one acceptable to the United States or its western allies.

“What’s really significant about this past year is that any pretence that there are important moderate, secular or liberal forces fighting in Syria has really been swept away,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, told IPS. “What you’re left with are radical forces: those behind Assad and those behind Islamist and jihadist groups.”

“America is paralysed, as well as most of the West, because they can’t support Assad, but they won’t support these radical Islamists either,” according to Landis, whose blog, Syria Comment, has an influential readership here.

That paralysis – as well as a civil war that most analysts believe remains stalemated – is of growing concern here. At least 125,000 people are believed to have been killed over the last two-and-a-half years, while 6.5 million, or a third of the population, are internally displaced.

Another 2.3 million have fled the country to neighbouring countries that are mostly ill-equipped to take them because of the demand on infrastructure and, in the cases of Lebanon and Jordan, the impact on political stability. Of the request for 13 billion dollars in humanitarian aid submitted for 2014 by the U.N.’s top relief coordinator, half is earmarked for Syrians.

In a survey of 1,200 U.S. government officials, academics and other experts released Thursday, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Centre for Preventive Action rated the spillover effects of the Syrian civil war, along with the increased violence in Afghanistan, at the top of 30 possible conflicts that are most likely to escalate and affect key U.S. interests in 2014.

In the past year, the conflict in Syria has contributed to a sharp surge in sectarian violence in neighbouring Iraq, while the influx of predominantly Sunni refugees and the deployment of some Hezbollah units to Syria have exacerbated sectarian tensions in Lebanon.

The Obama administration immediately suspended its non-humanitarian assistance to rebel groups after the Islamic Front took control of the FSA facilities. Washington has continued its humanitarian aid, which now exceeds 1.3 billion dollars since the crisis began.

While neo-conservatives and other strongly anti-Assad voices here still insist the administration should do more to aid secular factions on the ground, including with airstrikes against key government weapon systems, the notion that the alternative to Assad will likely be worse is gaining traction here.

Last week, the highly regarded former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told the New York Times that it was time “to start talking to the Assad regime again. As bad as he is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who should take over in his absence.”

Similarly, former CIA director Michael Hayden suggested recently that living with Assad might be “the best …[of the] very ugly possible outcomes.”

Most analysts here, like the administration, argue that neither side is strong enough to defeat the other militarily. But the main foreign sponsors of the two sides – Russia and Iran on Assad’s side, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states on the other – still believe their side will prevail, according to these analysts.

“The Americans have to accept that Assad’s not going and that we’re going to have to deal with him,” according to Landis.

“Iran and Russia have both entertained the hope that he will reconquer Syria, but they have to be persuaded that’s not going to happen, and the Gulf states have wanted a total Sunni win, and they have to be convinced they’re not going to get it,” Landis said.

“Everybody has to compromise in a serious way – to stop sending in weapons and money that fuel the fighting and to do it together, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia,” he added.

While the recent nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 has opened the possibility of some rapprochement between Washington and Tehran on regional issues, prioritising the nuclear issue has crowded out discussion of Syria.

Iran has said it wants to attend Geneva II, but it insists it will not do so under the precondition that it explicitly endorse the creation of a transitional government whose composition would be decided by agreement between the Assad regime and the opposition.

The precondition was established at the first Geneva conference held last year and was insisted on by the Saudis, who, it is widely believed here, are responsible for the Islamic Front’s refusal so far to attend the talks.

Washington’s deference to the Saudis, whose complaints against both Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran and his failure to follow through on threats to attack Syria in September have become deafening recently, has contributed to the impression of paralysis in U.S. policy.

“If ever there was a time when the Saudis deserved criticism, it would be now,” according to Tony Jones, a Gulf expert at Rutgers University. “Instead, we have [Secretary of Defence Chuck] Hagel going to Manama and offering up the standard view to ameliorate Saudi anxieties and Ford’s reaching out to the Islamic Front.”

“Saudi Arabia wants to win in Syria, while the administration says it is open to a broader range of options. But it appears that maintaining a strong relationship with the Saudis…is more important to the Americans than resolving the Syrian crisis in a way that might alienate them.”

The United States, according to Jones, should make it clear that it is “trying to prevent a further escalation of the conflict, and the only option would be for the Saudis to join it and as many other actors in Syria, including the Iranians, as are willing to participate in Geneva.”

The Golan Druze feel the brunt of Syria’s civil war. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Pierre Klochendler
MAJD E-SHAMS, Israeli-occupied Golan Heights , Dec 11 2013 (IPS)

The faint explosion is a reminder that though the newly refurbished fence protects their town, the two-and-a-half-year-old civil war which is tearing their motherland apart is never far off.

Separated from Syria for almost five decades, the Syrian Druze living in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights are coming to terms with the relative security stemming from their precarious neutrality in the Syrian conflict.

A thousand-year-old offshoot of Islam, the Druze are scattered across Syria, Lebanon and Israel. In this town of 11,000, the largely secular Druze fear the mounting influence of Jihadist rebel groups in the civil war.

“I support President Bashar Assad wholeheartedly because I’m Syrian,” says Hassan Fakhr-Eddin, a member of the close-knit community. “These foreign infidels, they want to turn secular Syria into an Islamist state.”

Though they’re outspoken about their unquestioned allegiance to Syria, politics are cautiously kept under a veil of secrecy.

By and large, Druze are loyal to the country they live in. But here, loyalty to Syria is challenged by the civil war.

At the beginning, the otherwise united and staunchly patriotic community split between Assad’s partisans and opponents. Brawls erupted.

“There are tensions between families and friends. I don’t speak to those who oppose Assad. They’re out of my life,” explains Ghandi Kahlouni, the local pharmacist.

“I’m against dictatorship, but also against any attempt to destroy Syria,” Kahlouni tells IPS. “Now it’s become clear – either you’re with Assad or you support the rebels and you’re a traitor.”

As their war-torn country sinks into an ever deeper quagmire, the Golan Druze are closing ranks. Dejected supporters of democratic change reckon that no revolution is worth the blood already spilled in Syria.

“Of course I’m disappointed, this isn’t what I had hoped for,” acknowledges Salim Safadi from the nearby Druze town of Mas’ade. “At the onset of the so-called revolution, we demonstrated for democratic change in Syria, and that’s legitimate.

“But then,” he continues, “Jihadist terrorists began to surf on the Syrian people’s hope for democracy. So it’s time to reflect. Currently, the alternative to Assad doesn’t provide such hope.”

War here is a distant memory. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six-Day War. Six years later, Syria fought another war against Israel to get it back, to no avail.

Ruins attest to the severity of the battle. An estimated 100,000 Golan Druze residents fled the war or were displaced, never allowed to return home. Families were separated. Only 22,000 Druze remain in a cluster of four villages, alongside 22,000 Israeli settlers.

Overlooking Syria, Israeli outposts are implanted on the mountain ridge that dominates the town, as well as in the centre of town. An Israeli flag flies atop the municipality building. It’s actually the only edifice adorned with the Star of David.

Others buildings wave the Druze colours. The Syrian flag is nowhere to be seen, so as not to scare off Israeli tourists, residents say.

Dolan Abu-Saleh is the head of the Majd e-Shams local council. An appointee of the Interior Ministry in Israel, he prudently urges the townspeople to refrain from taking sides in the Syrian conflict.

“Our heart goes out to the Syrian people. At the core of our sense of affiliation to Syria lays our attachment to the land and to our families there, but not necessarily to the regime,” Abu-Saleh tells IPS.

In 1981, Israel passed a law which applies Israeli laws and government to the strategic plateau. Backed by the international community, the Druze reject what in effect amounts to annexing Syria’s territory.

A full 90 percent of them have refused the proposed Israeli citizenship.

Himself a second-generation Israeli, the mayor insists the younger generation, uncertain of what the future holds in Syria, appreciate living under a strong and secure Israel.

“Security is a critical factor in shaping our faith,” says Abu-Saleh. “Youth see their future where it’s more secure. When they hear booms across the fence, they appreciate the value of security. “

Before the civil war, encouraged by the tuition-free education granted to them by the Syrian government, hundreds of Druze youth from the Golan would study science, medicine or dentistry in Syrian universities.

Now, they can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

“As a result of the influx of graduated professionals back home, the economy in the Golan Druze community flourished,” recalls Hamad Aweida, himself a Damascus University IT graduate and a local TV producer.

“Now many stay home, unemployed. The lucky few go to study in Germany, but it’s onerous,” Aweida tells IPS. “I fear that in three to five years, less educated people will be joining the workforce.”

Marah Sabra, 17, wants to emulate her elder sister Roseanne who studies education in the nearby settlement of Qatsrin to become a preschool teacher. “I love Syria and I wish her peace,” Sabra tells IPS from her home in Mas’ade. “But I’m afraid of the war. So my future lies here with Israel.”

The economic fallout is also felt in the farming industry. Apples constitute the main source of income for the Druze farmers.

Before the outbreak of the war, they’d export their apples via the Quneitra border crossing to Syrian markets under a special arrangement in force since 2005 that involves Israel, Syria, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Now, the crossing of apples to Syria is in jeopardy. Though last March the farmers belatedly managed to export 18,000 tons from the previous fall’s yield, they don’t know whether exports to Syria will resume.

“Before the war, we’d receive two or three times the price we get now for a box of apples,” bemoans Tawfiq Mustafa as he waits for Israeli customers to exhaust his stock at the Al-Ya’afuri market.

Packing houses which once processed the fruit prior to distribution to Syria are full, holding 50,000 tons – the Druze’s annual production.

The orchards, meanwhile, have been left to the weeds.

Redur Khalil: “Were it not for the Jihadists, the regime would have been toppled long ago.” Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria , Oct 25 2013 (IPS)

Kurdish fighters have emerged as a powerful player in the Syrian war thanks to the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG – “People’s Protection Units”), a seemingly well-organised armed group which has so far proved capable of defending the territory it claims in northern Syria.

IPS spoke to Redur Khalil at YPG headquarters in Qamishli in northeast Syria. A former Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighter with ten years of experience, Khalil – considered the public face of Kurdish resistance in Syria – has been a senior officer in the YPG since the start of the Syrian war.

About 40 million Kurds comprise today’s largest stateless nation. Numbering around three million in Syria, they are the biggest minority in the country, as many as the Alawites, the ethno-religious group of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Kurds are still in control of their areas in northern Syria, in a precarious balance between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Assad’s army. Nonetheless, the biggest threat towards stability in the areas where they are concentrated is posed by groups linked to Al Qaeda, several of which are allegedly backed by Turkey.

Q: What´s the current security situation in Kurdish-controlled areas?

A: Since Jul. 16 our forces have been constantly engaging in clashes with Al Qaeda-linked groups like Jabhat al Nusra and, especially, the ISIS – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – all across our territory.

These terrorist groups have not only killed and abducted Kurdish people and displaced civilians from their villages but also looted their properties, homes and places of work. After heavy clashes in areas like Afrin, 340 km north of Damascus, and Serekaniye, 506 km north of Damascus, we have pushed them down to Til Kocer, 840 km northeast of Damascus on the Syria-Iraq border.

Q: Many claim that Turkey has been funnelling jihadist cells across their border. What´s your take on that?

A: There´s no doubt about it. A few days ago we spotted them again coming from the Turkish border and we´ve even been attacked by Turkish artillery from their side. Two of our fighters were killed by gunfire from Turkish soldiers on the other side. But we also have a huge collection of IDs that belonged to fighters coming from Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrein… Many from Iraq and, so far, three from Turkey [he produces a pile of ID cards].

Q: But Assad´s presence in your areas is almost anecdotic. Why is there such a big presence of foreign fighters in the area?

A: It´s an unfortunate convergence of two agendas: Turkish chauvinism, which wants to boycott any step towards the recognition of the Kurdish people in Syria or elsewhere, and the Arab Islamists’ dream of an Islamic state.

We Kurds are caught in between those plans; we´re very much an obstacle for them so it´s actually us, and not the regime, that they´re fighting against now. We have suffered over 20 suicide attacks in the last 20 months.

Other than the foreigners, Assad also released prisoners from all over the country. Were it not for the Jihadists, the regime would have been toppled long ago.

Q: Do you have communication of any kind with such groups? And with Assad’s forces?

A: A few days ago we released some of their prisoners in exchange for the bodies of our martyrs. That´s all. As YPG we have no communication whatsoever with the Assad regime.

Q: Rumour has it that PKK fighters are flocking into Syria´s Kurdish areas to join your ranks.

A: It´s not true. Besides, we´re not waiting for them because we have clearly proved that we can manage the situation by ourselves. We have an army of 45,000 fighters, who have all gone through a 45-day training programme in the several camps across the Kurdish areas.

Q: Nonetheless, the PJAK – PKK’s counterpart in Iranian-controlled Kurdistan – has publicly said it wants to come and fight alongside your troops.

A: They are prepared to send their fighters, but as I said, we can handle the situation without any extra help. Both PKK and PJAK are welcome if they want to come, but for the time being we don´t really need them.

Q: Are there any non-Kurds within your ranks?

A: Indeed. A number of Arabs, Assyrians and Turkmens have joined us as well as men and women from all walks of life. Thirty-five percent of our fighters are women. We have lived together for centuries and they are an integral part of Kurdistan just as the Kurds are. YPG’s mission is to protect Western Kurdistan and all of its ethnic, national, and religious components.

Q: But there are also allegations that YPG is recruiting children.

A: Recruitment of conscripts under the legal age is completely rejected, it´s unacceptable and prohibited by the rules and regulations in force in this area.

Unfortunately, this did not prevent a few who did join voluntarily under the pressure of circumstances and through the neglect of some. In those few cases they were not allowed to participate in military operations and were not deployed in ‘hot’ areas. What I want to underline is that it was only actions of individuals, not of the system or the organisation as a whole.

Q: Kurdish opposition parties have accused you of indiscriminate use of force against protesters in the town of Amude, which resulted in the death of three activists last June.

A: We have videos, photos and documents that show that what happened in Amude was part of a conspiracy. Gunmen joined those protests and did not hesitate to shoot at a YPG convoy returning from a combat operation in the outskirts of Hasakah, 550 km northeast of Damascus. A member of the YPG, Sabri Gulo, was killed in that attack and two other fighters were injured.

Q: Where do you get funds and supplies?

A: We get support from the Kurdish Supreme Committee as well as from taxes collected at the borders under our control.

Q: Jabhat al-Akrad is also a Kurdish armed unit but not fighting alongside the YPG. What´s your relationship, if any, with them?

A: Jabhat al-Akrad was set up as a Kurdish unit that joined the FSA in Aleppo. But they´ve even engaged in clashes with them, when the Arab opposition attacked Kurdish areas. They´re also committed to the defence of the Kurdish land.

Q: How do you see the peace process between Ankara and Turkey´s Kurds?

A: As usual, the Kurdish side has moved forward whereas the Turks haven´t lifted a finger yet. Despite the obstacles, I strongly believe that peace will finally come and that issues between both sides will be settled. It´s not just one side but Turkish society as a whole that is demanding it. It may take longer than expected but I´m sure it will finally happen.

International peace talks on the Syria conflict could take place next month, Syria’s deputy prime minister has said.

Qadri Jamil, speaking in Moscow on Thursday, said the long-delayed international conference aimed at bringing the Syrian government and opposition together to seek an end to the country’s civil war would take place Nov. 23-24.

“Geneva is a way out for everyone: the Americans, Russia, the Syrian regime and the opposition,” Jamil was quoted as saying.

“Whoever realises this first will benefit. Whoever does not realise it will find himself overboard, outside the political process.”

Jamil named the dates when he was asked whether plans for the so-called Geneva 2 conference, which Russia and the U.S. have been trying to organise since May, had been pushed back from mid-November to late November or December.

When contacted by Al Jazeera, his office in Damascus said Jamil was speaking in his capacity as a member of an opposition delegation and not on behalf of the Syrian government.

Asked about Jamil’s comments, Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said it was not up to the Syrian government to name a date for the talks.

“I can neither confirm nor deny the dates mentioned by Mr Qadri Jamil,” Lukashevich said.

“This is a matter for the U.N. Secretary-General [Ban Ki-moon], under whose auspices this forum will be held. We will wait for his … official announcement of these dates.”

Russia and Western nations led by the U.S. have been pushing the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad to meet to try to hammer out a negotiated solution to the two-and-half year-old conflict, which has killed more than 115,000 people.

However, George Sabra, who heads the Syrian National Council, the largest member of the opposition National Coalition, has already said his group would not attend the talks in Geneva.

Against this backdrop, the world’s chemical-weapons watchdog said it had completed nearly half its inspections of the country’s arsenal with a view to its destruction by mid-2014.

Al Jazeera’s Omar Al Saleh, reporting from Antakya in neighbouring Turkey, said The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had expressed confidence in completing the operation within the designated period.

The OPCW is due to finish the first stage of its mandate by the beginning of next month.

Fighting in the north

On the ground, meanwhile, fighting between the Syrian army and anti-government fighters at a prison in the northern city of Aleppo eased a day after they assaulted the facility, activists said on Thursday.

Rebel forces had launched an attack on the government-controlled prison on Wednesday night, in the heaviest fighting for the jail in months, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based activists’ network.

Elsewhere in northern Syria, al Qaeda-linked fighters came under fire from the Turkish army after a stray mortar landed across the border, Turkish officials said.

In a separate development on Thursday, Abu Dhabi-based channel Sky News Arabia said that its crew had gone missing in the contested city of Aleppo in northern Syria.

The TV station said it lost contact on Tuesday morning with reporter Ishak Moctar, a Mauritanian national; cameraman Samir Kassab, a Lebanese national; and their Syrian driver whose name was being withheld at his family’s request.

Nart Bouran, Sky News Arabia chief, said the crew was on assignment primarily to focus on the humanitarian aspects of the conflict in Aleppo.

The channel appealed for any information on the team’s whereabouts and for help to ensure the journalists’ safe return.

Since Syria’s uprising erupted in March 2011, the country has become the most dangerous in the world for journalists, according to press freedom advocate groups.

Dozens of journalists have been kidnapped and more than 25 have been killed while reporting in Syria since the conflict began.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

As if the Iran nuclear issue was not already difficult enough, it became even more complicated when Bashar al-Assad unleashed his chemical weapons across Damascus suburbs last month. Suddenly, the Syria issue is overshadowing all other factors concerning Iran.

The Barack Obama administration is increasingly justifying its decision to respond militarily to Assad’s chemical weapons use in terms of the likely impact on Iran. Certainly, punishing Assad for crossing Obama’s red line on chemical weapons will make it less likely that Iran will cross Obama’s red line on production of nuclear weapons.

U.S. deterrence against weapons of mass destruction will be strengthened worldwide. North Korea, for example, which has even more chemical weapons than Syria, will be on notice not to even think about using them in any provocation against South Korea or in any conflict that might erupt as a result of a provocation.

Retaliatory strikes against Assad will also reinforce allies’ confidence that the U.S. has their back. In deciding last year not to order a unilateral attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was persuaded that Obama would not let Iran become nuclear-armed. Netanyahu’s faith in that assurance will be stronger if Obama demonstrates he is both willing and able to employ military power against Syria.

It’s not so much Obama’s personal credibility as the United States’ strategic credibility that is at stake. Letting Assad go unpunished could be the straw that breaks Netanyahu’s faith in the U.S. and leads to a premature and counterproductive Israeli attack on Iran that then brings the U.S. into an unwanted war.

On the other hand, U.S.-led airstrikes against Syria could set back prospects for peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue. A real solution to the problem is probably impossible, given the depth of differences between the protagonists: Iran wants a nuclear weapons capability and its adversaries don’t want Iran to have it.

Short-term confidence-building measures may be possible now that Hassan Rouhani is in the presidency but even such interim steps will require Iran to accept limits, such as shutting down operations at the Fordow enrichment plant, that so far have been out of the question in Tehran. Rouhani would be hard-pressed in the best of circumstances to persuade hardliners to accept such compromises. If their Syrian comrades-in-arms are attacked by the U.S., the hardliners will be smarting for revenge, not reconciliation.

The hardliners’ mood will be especially dark if Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ‘advisors’ suffer losses in the bombing. Given the extensive military support that Iran has been providing Assad, some Qods forces are likely to get caught in the crosshairs. This could trigger an asymmetric response.

Already there is a report that the IRGC has instructed militia proxies in Iraq to attack U.S. interests there in reprisal for any U.S. strikes on Syria. Iran won’t want to get dragged into a war with the U.S. because of Syria, but unintended escalation could ensue anyway.

As much as Rouhani will oppose action that could lead to conflict with the U.S., he does not control the IRGC. At the very least, they will redouble their supply of armaments to Assad’s forces, using Iraqi airspace and highways as transit routes.

Gaming out the potential impact on the Iranian nuclear programme is one reason to limit U.S. airstrikes, which should in any case be proportionate to Assad’s crime. Rouhani likely will have heard from former U.S. diplomat Jeff Feltman, now U.N. Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, who visited Tehran last week, that the limited U.S. strikes are not directed against Iran’s interests.

That message should be repeated and honoured. The Iran angle is not a justifiable reason for refraining from punishing Assad, but it is among the reasons for avoiding mission creep.

Meanwhile, it is Iran rather than the U.S. that stands to lose most from the Syrian conflict. Tehran’s backing of Assad’s brutality casts it in a villain role on the Arab street throughout the Sunni world. Iran’s pretentions that its own 1979 Islamic revolution was a precursor to the Arab Spring have been shown to be manifestly hypocritical.

And now Assad’s chemical weapons slaughter of women and children has exacerbated divisions in Iran itself, with former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani accusing the Syrian government. The Iranian people know that the armaments and financial props that Iran provides Assad soak up revenues that are more precious with each new sanctions measure Iran faces. In many ways, Syria has become Iran’s Vietnam: a quagmire from which it has no apparent escape.

Iran’s Syria predicament gives the United States newfound leverage. The best option for Iran is to lend its weight to a negotiated settlement on Syria. Seeing itself as the major power in the region, Iran has always wanted to be part of any Syria peace talks. Now, more than ever, it desperately wants to join Geneva-II as a way out of its predicament.

Whether or not Obama can bring the fractious Syrian opposition into peace talks, he does have the power to say yes or no to Iranian participation. To date, the arguments for not inviting Iran have won out: it has been part of the problem. But the Iranians can also be part of the solution, not least because of their leverage over Assad.

Iran’s desire to be at Geneva-II is why U.S. air strikes against Syria need not set back nuclear negotiations for very long. Obama should play the Syria card to get Iran to engage meaningfully on the issues of most importance for each.

Mark Fitzpatrick is director of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Programme at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He is the author of The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: Avoiding worst-case outcomes (London: IISS, 2008) and editor, inter alia, of Iran’s Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Capabilities (London: IISS, 2001). An archive of his recent writings can be accessed here.

World leaders from G20 are meeting in St Petersburg, Russia, amid sharp differences over possible U.S. military action against Syria in response to what the U.S. administration calls a deadly chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government.

Thursday’s summit comes hours after a U.S. Senate panel voted to give President Barack Obama authority to use military force against Syria – the first time lawmakers in that country have voted to allow military action since the October 2002 vote authorising the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. and Russia, which is a key Syrian ally, remain at odds as Obama has tried to build his case for military action. The U.S. president has vowed to continue to try to persuade his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, of the need for punitive strikes against President Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons, when the two meet in St Petersburg.

As Putin opened the summit, he spoke exclusively about the global economic crisis, which forms the primary agenda of the summit, stressing the need for coordinated international policy-making in order to combat continuing volatility in economic markets.

He suggested that world leaders discuss the subject of Syria “during dinner” on Thursday night, so as not to take away from the summit’s primary economic agenda.

Kerry ‘a liar’

Earlier, Putin had again questioned Western evidence justifying a military strike against Syria, accusing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry outright of lying when, in urging Congress to approve strikes, he played down the role of al-Qaeda in the rebel forces.

“Al-Qaeda units are the main military echelon, and they know this,” Putin said. “He is lying and knows he is lying. It’s sad.”

Putin said U.S. congressional approval without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be an act of aggression. He also told The Associated Press this week that he “does not exclude” supporting U.N. action – if it is proven that the Syrian government used poison gas on its own people.

Obama had previously stated that he was prepared to bypass the U.N. Security Council on the issue. But he put the matter to a Congressional vote. Members of the full U.S. Senate are due to debate the matter next week.

The conflict in Syria, which began with a popular uprising in March 2011, has been stalemated, and it is not clear if U.S. military strikes over the government’s alleged chemical weapons use would change that. Obama has said he seeks limited pinpoint action to deter future chemical attacks, not regime change.

Economic and nuclear risks

Meanwhile, China has warned other world powers of global economic risks following the potential U.S. strikes on Syria.

Speaking in St Petersburg ahead of the G20 summit on Thursday, Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said such “military action would definitely have a negative impact on the global economy, especially on the oil price”.

He cited estimates that a 10 dollar rise in oil prices could push down global growth by 0.25 percent.

He urged a negotiated U.N. solution to the standoff over allegations that Syria’s government used chemical weapons against its own people, expressing hope that “the world economic balance will become more stable rather than more complex and more challenging.”

Russia has also issued a warning that U.S. strikes on Syria’s atomic facilities might result in a nuclear catastrophe and is urging the U.N. to present a risk analysis of such a scenario. The issue will be brought up at a meeting of the 35-nation IAEA board next week, the Interfax news agency reported.

Little international support

Obama has been lobbying for international and domestic support for punishing Assad’s regime, which the U.S. says fired rockets loaded with the nerve agent sarin on rebel-held areas near Damascus before dawn on Aug. 21, killing hundreds of civilians.

So far, however, he has won little international backing for action. The U.S. has France’s support for military action in Syria. But several other G20 powers, including China and Germany, have firmly voiced their opposition.

Ben Rhodes, a senior Obama national security aide, said that the U.S. would use the summit in St Petersburg to “explain our current thinking” to allies and partners and explore what type of “political and diplomatic support they may express for our efforts to hold Syrian regime accountable”.

With pressure mounting on the G20 to make a decision regarding the conflict, the U.N. announced on Thursday that Lakhdar Brahimi, its special envoy to Syria, was travelling to St Petersburg to make a push for peace talks.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

What seemed inevitable just 48 hours ago – an imminent U.S. missile attack on Syrian targets in response to an alleged chemical attack that reportedly killed hundreds of Syrian citizens – stalled Thursday as the justification for military action faced increasing questioning both here and abroad.

Growing calls by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers for consultations with, if not formal authorisation by, Congress before Obama takes any military action have raised the potential political costs on Capitol Hill if Obama proceeds on his own.

While the administration continues to express certainty that the Syrian government was responsible for the alleged Aug. 21 attack, the Associated Press, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, reported Thursday that such a case fell short of a “slam dunk” – a reference to then-CIA director George Tenet’s mistaken declaration that President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Some officials cited in the story said they could not entirely rule out the possibility that rebels were responsible for the attack on a Damascus suburb – as alleged by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad."Simply lashing out with military force under the banner of 'doing something' will not secure our interests in Syria."
-- Representative Adam Smith

According to AP, officials could not tie Assad or his inner circle to any directive ordering the use of chemical weapons or even to foreknowledge of the attack, suggesting that the decision may have made by lower-ranking military officers or a rogue commander.

The administration has scheduled a telephone conference call with members of Congress for Thursday evening, but officials said the briefing would not include classified information that could confirm the nature of the attack or who was responsible. A White House spokesman said the administration still hopes to release an unclassified intelligence assessment by the weekend.

Meanwhile, the administration faced other problems overseas, not least of which was the refusal earlier this week of the Arab League to explicitly endorse a military attack and the appeals by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his special envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, to await the findings of U.N. inspectors who have been in Syria this week investigating the site of the alleged attack, taking testimony and blood samples from its victims. Ban said Thursday the inspectors would not leave Syria until Saturday.

On Thursday, the British parliament voted against military intervention in Syria, leading Prime Minister David Cameron to say his country would not join the action in which he had previously pledged to participate, along with the leaders of France and Turkey.

Britain has long been Washington’s closest military ally, and most analysts consider it inconceivable that Obama would launch a strike, however limited, without allied and especially British support.

Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, who during the administration’s deliberations late last week reportedly opposed striking, told reporters in Brunei Thursday that any action against Damascus would require “international collaboration”.

However, it appears now that whatever hopes the administration had earlier this week of carrying out “limited” military strikes for two or three days against Syrian targets as early as this weekend have dissipated.

It was widely believed that Obama had hoped to complete military operations against Syria before he left Tuesday Sept. 3 for the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, that begins Thursday Sept. 5.

Most analysts here consider it highly unlikely that he would want to carry out an attack while being hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s most-important international backer and Washington’s co-chair in long-stalled negotiations between Assad and opposition forces to end the civil war in Syria.

Moscow has threatened to veto any resolution at the U.N. Security Council that would authorise military action against Damascus, and U.S.-Russian relations are already at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But growing domestic opposition to even limited strikes of the kind Obama suggested during a PBS interview Wednesday he would pursue may be more decisive.

As of Thursday morning, 140 members of the House of Representatives had signed a letter calling on Obama to gain Congressional approval before taking ay military action, according to the “Hill” newspaper.

“Engaging our military in Syria when no direct threat to the United States exists and without prior congressional authorisation would violate the separation of powers that is clearly delineated in the Constitution,” said the letter, which also charged that Obama’s participation in the NATO campaign against Libya in 2011 was unconstitutional because it lacked authorisation.

Over the last two days, a number of influential Democrats from both houses have also privately expressed serious reservations to the White House about attacking Syria, noting that even limited strikes could draw the United States into another Middle Eastern civil war.

“Simply lashing out with military force under the banner of ‘doing something’ will not secure our interests in Syria,” noted Washington Representative Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Recent public opinion polls suggest strong opposition to military action at the grassroots level. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Aug. 19-23 found that only a quarter of respondents said they would support U.S. military intervention if Assad used chemical weapons against the civilian population.

A Huffington Post/YouGov survey taken earlier this week found the same percent would support air strikes to aid Syrian rebels, while 41 percent were opposed. Thirty-one percent agreed with the statement that the U.S. has a responsibility to prevent Syria from using chemical weapons against rebels, while 38 percent disagreed.

Meanwhile, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the only independent international non-governmental organisation that has provided statistics regarding casualties resulting from the alleged attack and which reported Aug. 24 that three hospitals near the affected area had received 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms, of whom 355 died, issued a formal statement Thursday “warn[ing] that its information could not be used as evidence to certify the precise origin” of the attack or designate “the perpetrators”.

It added that its previous statement should not “be used as a substitute for the [U.N.’s] investigation or as a justification for military action.”

In another statement released Thursday, Amnesty International said “the best course of action would be for the United Nations to complete its investigation into this latest outrage and for the United Nations Security Council to refer all evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity from this and other incidents to the International Criminal Court.”

The Council could consider other measures, it said, including “targeted economic sanctions and the deployment of international human rights monitors”.

The British government has published internal legal advice which it said showed it was legally entitled to take military action against Syria, even if the United Nations Security Council blocked such action.

It also published intelligence material on Thursday on last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, saying there was no doubt that such an attack had taken place.

The document is the latest sign that a coalition of Western countries, including the United States, France and the UK, are moving towards military action against Syria after the alleged attack. It was “highly likely” that the Syrian government was behind the attack, the document said.

“If action in the Security Council is blocked, the UK would still be permitted under international law to take exceptional measures in order to alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe in Syria,” a copy of the British government’s legal position read.

In such circumstances, it added that “military intervention to strike specific targets with the aim of deterring and disrupting further such attacks would be necessary and proportionate and therefore legally justifiable”.

In a debate on Thursday, however, Prime Minister David Cameron told the British parliament it was “unthinkable” that Britain would launch military action against Syria if there was strong opposition at the Security Council.

“It would be unthinkable to proceed if there was overwhelming opposition in the Security Council,” he said.

Syria defiant

Earlier on Thursday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that his country would defend itself against any foreign military intervention.

“Syria will defend itself in the face of any aggression, and threats will only increase its commitment to its principles and its independence,” the embattled Syrian leader told a visiting delegation of Yemeni politicians, according to state media.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that the United States had “concluded” that the Syrian government had carried out a chemical attack. Obama advocated the use of a “tailored, limited” military strike in response.

He was referring to an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Damascus Eastern Ghouta suburbs last week that aid agencies say killed at least 355 people, and injured as many as 3,000 others.

“We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out,” Obama said in the televised interview. But he did not present any direct evidence to back up his assertion, and the government has strongly denied accusations that it was involved.

‘Destabilisation’

Arguing for measured intervention after long resisting deeper involvement in Syria, Obama insisted that while Assad’s government must be punished, he intended to avoid repeating the errors made in the 2003 Iraq war.

The most likely option, U.S. officials say, would be to launch cruise missiles from U.S. ships in the Mediterranean in a campaign that would last several days.

New hurdles have, however, emerged that appear to have slowed the formation of an international coalition that could use military force to hit Syria.

On Wednesday, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council failed to reach an agreement on a draft resolution from the British seeking authorisation for the use of force.

Russia objected to international intervention, after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier rejected the case for ascribing culpability to the Syrian government at this time, adding that foreign military intervention would lead to “destabilisation of […] the country and the region”.

Chinese state media on Thursday said that any military intervention “would have dire consequences for regional security and violate the norms governing international relations”.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

The United States is debating whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Above, Syrian rebel forces. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.

On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility is at stake, especially now that Secretary of State John Kerry has publicly endorsed the case that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad must have been responsible for the alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that was reported to have killed hundreds of people.

Just one year ago, Obama warned that the regime’s use of such weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game-changer” that would force Washington to reassess its policy of not providing direct military aid to rebels and of avoiding military action of its own.

After U.S. intelligence confirmed earlier this year that government forces had on several occasions used limited quantities of chemical weapons against insurgents, the administration said it would begin providing arms to opposition forces, although rebels complain that nothing has yet materialised.

The hawks have further argued that U.S. military action is also necessary to demonstrate that the most deadly use of chemical weapons since the 1988 Halabja massacre by Iraqi forces against the Kurdish population there – a use of which the US. was fully aware but did not denounce at the time – will not go unpunished.

Military action should be “sufficiently large that it would underscore the message that chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction simply cannot be used with impunity,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “The audience here is not just the Syrian government.”

While the hawks, whose position is strongly backed by the governments of Britain, France, Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel, clearly have the wind at their backs, the doves have not given up.

Remembering Iraq

Recalling the mistakes and distortions of U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, some argue that the administration is being too hasty in blaming the Syrian government. "The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends."
-- Eliot Cohen

If it waits until United Nations inspectors, who visited the site of the alleged attack Monday, complete their work, the United States could at least persuade other governments that Washington is not short-circuiting a multilateral process as it did in Iraq.

Many also note that military action could launch an escalation that Washington will not necessarily be able to control, as noted by a prominent neo-conservative hawk, Eliot Cohen, in Monday’s Washington Post.

“Chess players who think one move ahead usually lose; so do presidents who think they can launch a day or two of strikes and then walk away with a win,” wrote Cohen, who served as counsellor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends.”

“What if [Obama] hurls cruise missiles at a few key targets, and Assad does nothing and says, ‘I’m still winning.’ What do you then?” asked Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served for 16 years as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Do you automatically escalate and go up to a no-fly zone and the challenges that entails, and what then if that doesn’t get [Assad’s] attention?

“This is fraught with tar-babiness,” he told IPS in a reference to an African-American folk fable about how Br’er Rabbit becomes stuck to a doll made of tar. “You stick in your hand, and you can’t get it out, so you then you stick in your other hand, and pretty soon you’re all tangled up all this mess – and for what?”

“Certainly there are more vital interests in Iran than in Syria,” he added. “You can’t negotiate with Iran if you start bombing Syria,” he said, a point echoed by the head of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi.

“There is a real opportunity for successful diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue, but that opportunity will either be completely spoiled or undermined if the U.S. intervention in Syria puts the U.S. and Iran in direct combat with each other,” he told IPS. Humanitarian concerns and U.S. credibility should also be taken into account when considering intervention, he said.

Remembering Kosovo

Still, the likelihood of military action – almost certainly through the use of airpower since even the most aggressive hawks, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have ruled out the commitment of ground troops – is being increasingly taken for granted here.

Lingering questions include whether Washington will first ask the United Nations Security Council to approve military action, despite the strong belief here that Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter and arms supplier, and China would veto such a resolution.

“Every time we bypass the council for fear of a Russian or Chinese veto, we drive a stake into the heart of collective security,” noted Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Long-term, that’s not in our interest.”

But the hawks, both inside the administration and out, are urging Obama to follow the precedent of NATO’s air campaign in 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo War. In that case, President Bill Clinton ignored the U.N. and persuaded his NATO allies to endorse military intervention on humanitarian grounds.

The 78-day air war ultimately persuaded Yugoslav President Milosovic to withdraw his troops from most of Kosovo province, but not before NATO forces threatened to deploy ground troops, a threat that the Obama administration would very much like to avoid in the case of Syria.

While the administration is considered most likely to carry out “stand-off” strikes by cruise missiles launched from outside Syria’s territory to avoid its more formidable air-defence system and thus minimise the risk to U.S. pilots, there remains considerable debate as to what should be included in the target list.

Some hawks, including McCain and Graham, have called not only for Washington to bomb Syrian airfields and destroy its fleet of warplanes and helicopter and ballistic capabilities, but also to establish no-fly zones and safe areas for civilians and rebel forces to tilt the balance of power decisively against the Assad government. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, have urged the same.

But others oppose such far-reaching measures, noting that the armed opposition appears increasingly dominated by radical Islamists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that the aim of any military intervention should be not only to deter the future use of chemical weapons but also to prod Assad and the more moderate opposition forces into negotiations, as jointly proposed this spring by Moscow and Washington. In their view, any intervention should be more limited so as not to provoke Assad into escalating the conflict.

The United States should think twice before intervening military in Syria, says Robert Hunter. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Robert E. Hunter
WASHINGTON, Aug 26 2013 (IPS)

President Obama got it right. He was picked by U.S. voters to put the nation’s interests first – not those of any ally, any member of Congress, or the media, even if they clamour for him to “do something” yet do not take responsibility for the consequences if things go wrong, as they have for some time in the Middle East.

Today, the issue raised by U.S. media and some of America’s allies are allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used poison gas to kill or maim thousands of Syrians. The consensus among Western commentators, in and outside of the government, has been built around this proposition, and it may be right.

United Nations inspectors may be able to verify the causes and perpetrators of these deaths and injuries. Let us hope so, before the United States or other countries begin direct military action of any kind that will be crossing the Rubicon.

Perhaps U.S. intelligence knows the facts; again, let us hope so. And let us hope that we do not later discover that intelligence was distorted, as it was before the ill-fated U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the consequences of which are still damaging U.S. interests in the Middle East and eroding the region’s stability.

In addition to being unable to turn back once the United States becomes directly engaged in combat, however limited, is the difficulty of believing that Assad would have been so foolish as to use poison gas, unless Syrian command-and-control is so poor that some military officer ordered its use without Assad’s permission.

If one invokes the concept of cui bono (“to whose benefit?”), those with the most to gain if the United States acted to bring down the current Syrian government would be Syrian rebels or their supporters, including Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Such a move would increase the likelihood of even more killing and perhaps genocide against Syria’s Alawites."It has long been clear that the Syrian conflict is not just about Syria."
-- Robert E. Hunter

But citing the possibility that we are all being misled about who used poison gas – a tactic known as a false flag – does not mean it is true. It does redouble the need for the United States to be certain about who used the gas before taking military action. Obama has gotten this right, too.

So if we become directly involved in the fighting, then what?

This question must always be asked before acting. Sometimes, such as with Pearl Harbour, Hitler’s declaring war on the United States, or pushing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, striking back hard for as long as it takes is clearly the right course.

Less clear of a situation was Vietnam. Ugly consequences also ensued from arming and training Osama bin Laden and his ilk to punish the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and, in one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history, from invading Iraq in 2003.

It has long been clear that the Syrian conflict is not just about Syria. It is also about the balance between Sunni and Shia aspirations throughout the core of the Middle East. Iran, a Shia state, started the ball rolling with its 1979 Islamic revolution. Several U.S. administrations contained the virus of sectarianism, but invading Iraq and toppling its minority Sunni regime got the ball rolling again.

Now Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are bent on toppling the minority Alawite – a mystical offshoot of Shi’ism – regime in Syria. Even if they succeed, the region’s internecine warfare won’t stop there.

Meanwhile, there is a geopolitical struggle for predominance in the region, principally involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. Iran has Shia-dominated Iraq, Assad’s Syria, and Hezbollah as acolytes. Saudi Arabia has the other Gulf Arab states, while Turkey has its regional ambitions extending to Central Asia. And since Israel’s conclusion that its Syrian strategic partner, the Assad family, is doomed, it has thrown in its lot with the Sunni states. But it wants change before Syria is completely dominated by the fundamentalists.

From the U.S. perspective, the regional situation is a mess, and the tipping point that would make things much worse could be direct military intervention in Syria.

It is too late for Obama to take back his ill-considered statement about the use of poison gas being a “red line” in Syria when he was not prepared to go for broke in toppling Assad. It is too late as well for him to reconsider his call for Assad to go, which further stoked the fears of the Alawites that they could be slaughtered.

It is also late for him to tell Gulf Arabs to stop fostering the spread of Islamist fundamentalism of the worst sort throughout the region, from Egypt to Pakistan to Afghanistan, where American troops have died as a result.

It is also late, but let us hope not too late, for a U.S.-led full-court press on the political-diplomatic front to set the terms for a reasonably viable post-Assad Syria rather than sliding into war and unleashing potentially terrible uncertainties. Let us recall what happened in Afghanistan after we stayed on after deposing the Taliban, and in Iraq after 2003. Neither place is in much better shape, if at all, even after the loss of thousands of U.S. lives and trillions in U.S. treasure.

And it is also late, but hopefully not too late, for the Obama administration to engage in strategic thinking about the Middle East; to see the region from North Africa to Southwest Asia as “all of a piece”, and to craft an overall policy towards critical U.S. interests throughout the area.

This week, President Obama should heed the clear wake-up call, resist the call to do something militarily in Syria, and place his bet on vigorous and unrelenting diplomacy for a viable post-Assad Syria and the reassertion of U.S. leadership throughout the region.

*Robert E. Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, was director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council Staff in the Carter Administration and in 2011-12 was Director of Transatlantic Security Studies at the National Defense University.

Excerpt:

Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson speaks to journalists on Aug. 21 following his closed-door briefing to the Security Council on the latest allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 22 2013 (IPS)

The United States, Britain and France, three veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, are making a strong push for an “urgent” U.N. investigation of the alleged use of chemical weapons Wednesday in Syria.

The UK Deputy Permanent Representative Ambassador Phillip Parham told reporters Thursday that a letter, signed by over 35 member states, was being delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for a “swift investigation”.

But he refused to identify the countries, nor was letter made public.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, did not contain the list of signatories. The only three permanent members taking the lead, and whose signatures appear on the letter, were the United States, Britain and France.

Both Russia and China, the other two permanent members, were not signatories.

The letter, dated Aug. 21, says: “We would like to bring to your attention credible reports of the use of chemical weapons on 21 August 2013 in Rif Damascus. Given the gravity of these reports, we judge it essential that all the pertinent facts are swiftly investigated.”

The letter requests the secretary-general to launch an urgent investigation into these allegations “as expeditiously as possible” under the auspices of the secretary general’s ‘Mechanism for the Investigation of Alleged Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons.’

This “mechanism” was derived from the mandate established by the U.N. General Assembly in its resolution A/RES/42/37C of Nov. 30, 1987.

The letter requests Ban to “report back to Member States as soon as possible”.

Russia, which has stood by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, claims the alleged chemical arms attack Wednesday was a “pre-planned provocation” orchestrated by the rebels.

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying, “All of this looks like an attempt at all costs to create a pretext for demanding that the U.N. Security Council side with opponents of the regime and undermine the chances of convening the Geneva conference.”

The proposed conference was aimed at peace negotiations between the Syrian government and rebels, but it has failed to get off the ground.

Currently, there is a U.N. team in Damascus trying to investigate earlier attacks with chemical weapons, but the team’s mandate is limited to whether or not chemical weapons were used in these attacks last year. And the team does not have a mandate to pin the blame either on the Syrian government or the rebels.

“We are aware that the UN Mission is now in Damascus,” the letter notes. “We urge you to do all you can to ensure that the Mission has urgent access to all relevant sites and sources of information.”

To assist the investigation, the letter lists a selection of open source information, along with web links.

Meanwhile, in a statement released Thursday, the secretary-general said he was shocked to hear the reports of the alleged use of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus.

Professor Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish expert on chemical weapons, and his team are currently in Syria to investigate the alleged use of chemical weapons reported by the government of Syria at Khan al-Assal, as well as two other allegations of the use of chemical weapons reported by member states, he noted.

According to the agreement reached in Damascus in July, the two parties are discussing, in parallel, other allegations and their related sites.

The United Nations mission to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria is following the current situation in Syria carefully, and remains fully engaged in the investigation process that is mandated by the secretary-general, said a statement from his spokesman.

“Professor Sellstrom is in discussions with the Syrian government on all issues pertaining to the alleged use of chemical weapons, including this most recent reported incident. The Secretary-General reiterates that any use of chemical weapons by any side under any circumstances would violate international humanitarian law,” the statement added.

Meanwhile, the 15-members of the Security Council issued a statement Thursday calling for a U.N. investigation of the chemical weapons attack. But it stopped short of adopting a resolution, which would have been vetoed by Russia and possibly China.

Philippe Bolopion, U.N. Director at Human Rights Watch, said the “tortuous Security Council unofficial statement” on Syria misses the mark and fails the victims.

“When faced with serious allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria, rather than seeking the truth and demanding cooperation with U.N. investigators, Russia and China chose once again to protect a government that has been slaughtering its own population,” he said.

“They will go down in history as two major enablers of Assad’s bloody tactics to repress the Syrian people.”

A poster against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Photo courtesy of Shadi Latta.

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

For the small town of Kafranbel in Syria, the old saying “a pen is mightier than a sword” still rings true. Every week in Kafranbel, protesters draw posters, write banners and demonstrate against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In a twist, however, hundreds of such posters and banners are finding their way to the United States through activists’ efforts to ensure that this evidence is preserved for future generations.

Shadi Latta, a doctor based in Illinois, received the first 100 posters in February. The next set had about 20 posters, and he expects about 100 more soon, according to Latta, who was born and raised in Kafranbel.

The posters are smuggled out of Syria and stockpiled in Turkey before being shipped to the United States, Latta said, adding that taking them out of the country was probably the only way to preserve them.

With the raiding of major cities and demolition of historical sites, experts say that Syria’s cultural heritage is under threat as war rages between the rebels and Assad’s forces.

The World Heritage Committee has added six World Heritage sites in Syria to its “List of World Heritage in Danger”, and Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, condemned the continuing destruction of the ancient city of Aleppo, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986.

For those in Kafranbel, the posters and banners are becoming an integral part of Syria’s history and as such must be preserved for future generations, said 41-year-old Raed Fares, who was behind the idea."This was a way for us to reach out to the international community and get our message out there."
-- Raed Fares

“Under constant shelling and bombing, you never know when you could lose all of these,” said Fares, who is based in Kafranbel. “We thought that it is better to ship them to the U.S. so that they are safe. Also, this was a way for us to reach out to the international community and get our message out there.”

Exhibitions

Latta has been helping Fares in this endeavour by displaying the posters in the United States, with exhibitions held in Indianapolis, Chicago and Atlanta, as well as in other areas.

Reactions have been emotional, but sometimes people are simply surprised, said Latta. Written in both Arabic and English, the posters are witty and unapologetic. “That is what people like about them,” he said.

The posters also reflect U.S. pop culture, often using Hollywood movies and cartoon characters as underlying themes to communicate with a global audience.

Latta’s personal favourite is a picture of Assad in a famous pose from the movie “Titanic”.

Though the original posters are not for sale, duplicates are made for people who want to buy them, said Latta.

The plan is to organise an exhibition in New York by the end of July. So far the exhibitions have managed to raise 650,000 dollars, which is going towards humanitarian aid in Syria, he added.

A long road

Creating these posters and getting them to the United States is no easy task, however.

It all started when Fares, who was studying medicine at Aleppo University, teamed up with Ahmad Jalal, an artist who agreed to create posters back in 2011.

When Fares and Jalal initially began their work, Kafranbel was still a battlefront, Fares recollected.

The duo would draw the posters in a makeshift tent a few miles away from Kafranbel. “Assad’s men knew we were doing it,” said Fares, who eventually dropped out of college. “They burned down our houses and destroyed all the buildings in the area. But since we were hiding they couldn’t arrest us. That is why we are still alive.”

With the Assad regime closely monitoring every anti-Assad chant or protest, demonstrators would immediately burn the posters after the protests, recalled Fares.

“But we realised that this was part of our history, and we should preserve them instead of destroying them,” Fares said. They soon began burying posters after every demonstration, until Fares realised that nearby Turkey would be the safest place to store them.

Posters were being smuggled out of Kafranbel, across  Syria’s border and into Turkey, and they are now being shipped to Latta’s home in the U.S. state of Illinois.

“When I would get the posters here, there would be particles of soil stuck on them,” Latta said. “Some of them would be moist, simply because they were buried for such a long time.”

Later, when Kafranbel, which has a population of just under 20,000, fell into the hands of the rebels, Fares and Jalal set up their own office in the town.

The “media centre” is now their official space where they carry out their work. Equipped with generators and laptops, the centre is also home to foreign journalists who arrive at Kafranbel. As an activist, Fares now films demonstrations and tries to spread awareness about the real situation in Syria.

“We are just peaceful protestors who are fighting against oppression,” Fares said. He doesn’t identify himself as a rebel or a fighter but emphasises that the people of Kafranbel are on the rebels’ side.

For those like Latta who are part of the Syrian diaspora, everyday reports of violence are unnerving. Latta’s in-laws are still in Syria, while some of his family members have left the country.

The United Nations estimates that the death toll in Syria since March 2011 has reached nearly 93,000. Still, Latta and Fares are hopeful, believing that victory will be theirs and Assad’s end is near.

The Obama administration intends to militarily arm Syrian opposition. Credit: FreedomHouse2/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Despite Thursday’s announcement that President Barack Obama has decided to provide direct military assistance to Syrian rebels, what precisely the administration has in mind remains unclear.

Analysts here are also questioning whether the decision is part of a deliberate strategy – and, if so, what that strategy is – or whether it is instead another in a series of efforts to relieve growing pressure from its allies in Europe and the Gulf and hawks at home to take stronger military measures designed to shift the 27-month-old civil war decisively in favour of the opposition.

“When Julius Caesar actually crossed the [Rubicon], he proceeded rapidly to mission accomplishment in accordance with a sound strategy,” noted retired Ambassador Frederic Hof, a Syria specialist at the Atlantic Council who has long called for stronger U.S. military intervention.

“Although the administration’s crossing [decision] is significant, welcome, and long overdue, it is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective or simply mill around the river bank.”

The White House tied the decision to escalate the “scope and scale” of military aid to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian Military Council (SMC) to the U.S. intelligence community’s determination that the Syrian forces had used chemical weapons – albeit “on a small scale” – against rebel forces in multiple battles over the past year.

It also cited the deepening involvement of Iran and Hezbollah militants from Lebanon in support of the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, whose departure from office Obama has repeatedly demanded since hostilities first broke out more than two years ago."It is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective."
-- Frederic Hof

The announcement, however, followed a series of intensive internal meetings over the past two weeks, as it became clear that the regime’s forces had made a series of battlefield advances – most importantly by capturing, with Hezbollah’s help, the strategic western town of Al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border – that threatened to tip the war decisively in Assad’s favour.

With pro-government forces and Hezbollah fighters reportedly preparing a major assaults on the key city of Aleppo and other “moderate” opposition leaders appealing desperately for weapons, the administration has found itself under pressure from both its allies abroad and hawks here to “do something” that could halt, if not reverse, the regime’s momentum and restore the “strategic stalemate” that Washington considers essential to any prospect for a political settlement.

But what precisely that “something” is or will be remains unclear. In a briefing for reporters Thursday evening, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes repeatedly avoided answering the question, insisting, however, that Washington will increase “the scope and scale” of direct aid to the SMC which so far has received mainly humanitarian and “non-lethal” assistance.

According to various published reports, Obama has indeed decided to provide small arms and ammunition but still pending are decisions on rebel requests for anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Washington had previously ruled out the latter, in part due to Israel’s concerns that they could be used against its aircraft, particularly if they fall into the hands of radical Islamist factions among the anti-Assad forces.

But hawks here have argued that small arms and even anti-tank weapons are at this point insufficient to redress the rapidly tilting balance of power on the ground.

“The president must rally an international coalition to take military actions to degrade Assad’s ability to use airpower and ballistic missiles and to move and resupply his forces around the battlefield by air,” declared Congress’s most visible interventionists, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham late Thursday. “We must take more decisive actions now to turn the tide of the conflict in Syria.”

They and others have called for Washington to create “no-fly zones” along Syria’s Turkish and Jordanian borders that would both safe havens for refugees and rebels and permit the latter to be trained, armed and supplied for operations against government forces inside Syria.

Hof has urged that such a zone also be used protect a rebel government that could gain formal recognition from the United States and other allies, request heavier weapons and eventually go to peace talks as diplomatic, as well as military, equals of the Assad government.

While Rhodes told reporters that Obama has “not made any decision to pursue a military operations such as a no-fly zone”, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that a Pentagon proposal still under consideration calls for a limited “no-fighting” zone extending up to 40 kilometres inside Syria that would be enforced by U.S. and allied aircraft operating from Jordanian airspace.

In recent months, Washington has set up Patriot air-defence batteries and sent fighter jets to bases inside Jordan, where it has also been secretly training rebel and Jordanian forces on securing chemical-weapons facilities and weapons in the event the Assad regime collapses, according to some reports.

Some analysts who have opposed escalating U.S. involvement in the civil war agree that directly supplying arms to the rebels would be unlikely to turn the military tide, certainly in the short term, and could carry additional risks.

“Selective arms shipments could [spur] clashes between rival rebel groups. Extremist elements might attack more moderate rebel units receiving better arms, driven by need, resentment or both,” according to Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State Department intelligence unit on the Near East, who noted that this could actually strengthen the regime. Indeed, he added, the “rebel military vanguard” for some time has been the “radical Islamist in character – even Al-Qaeda affiliated”.

He also expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone, noting that it would risk swift escalation. “The rebels would remain at the mercy of the regime’s other heavy weapons on the ground, thus tempting those establishing any sort of no-fly zone to attack regime ground targets as well.”

“The first step on the slippery slope is always easy, but it’s much harder to actually resolve a conflict or to find a way out of a quagmire,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, on the eve of the White House announcement.

For Lynch, who has long urged Obama to resist calls to escalate Washington’s intervention, the key issue is what U.S. policy ultimately aims to achieve and whether providing military aid or taking more aggressive measures will help achieve them.

“Should Syria be viewed as a front in a broad regional cold war against Iran and its allies or as a humanitarian catastrophe that must be resolved?” he asked, noting that very different strategies should be followed depending on the answer to that question.

At the moment, according to Lynch, “advocates of arming the rebels switch between making the case that it would strike a blow against the Iranians (and Hezbollah) and that it would improve the prospects for a negotiated solution.”

While the White House clearly framed its decision this week in the latter terms, it may nonetheless add momentum to those who tend to view the Syrian conflict more as part of the larger conflict against Tehran the model for which, according to Lynch, “would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighbouring countries, fuelled by Gulf money, and popularised by Islamist and sectarian propaganda”.

The United States has said it will increase direct support to the Syrian opposition. Credit: Freedom House//CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

With U.S. intelligence agencies’ concluding that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebel forces, the White House announced Thursday that it will increase “the scope and scale” of assistance it has been providing to the opposition, including direct support to its military arm.

In a late afternoon teleconference, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, repeatedly declined to say whether support will include arms that the western-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC) has requested in light of recent setbacks it has suffered on the battlefield.

“We’ve heard their request, and our aim is to be responsive,” he said. “This is going to be different in both scope and scale in terms of what we have provided to the SMC…and will be aimed at strengthening [its] effectiveness.”

But Rhodes appeared to rule out direct military action, including creating a “no-fly zone” to protect the rebels or carrying out airstrikes against facilities used by the regime’s forces, whose ranks were recently bolstered by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon.

“We have not made any decision to pursue a military operation such as a no-fly zone,” he said, as it “would carry great and open-ended costs” and would not necessarily ensure a dramatic improvement in the rebels’ situation on the ground."We have not made any decision to pursue a military operation such as a no-fly zone."
-- Ben Rhodes

“We are prepared for all contingencies, and we will make decisions on our own timeline,” he said. “Any future action we take will be consistent with our national interest and must advance our objectives.”

The White House announcement came amidst a growing sense of urgency by the opposition and their U.S. supporters, who are worried that recent battlefield successes by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – notably their capture last week of the border town of Al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border – has shifted the tide of the war in the regime’s favour.

While the administration initially described the opposition’s setbacks as tactical and unlikely to end a strategic stalemate, U.S. intelligence agencies and some independent analysts have reportedly painted a more pessimistic picture, suggesting that momentum in the nearly two-and-a-half-year-old war has moved decisively towards the regime.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that top SMC commander, General Salim Idris, had sent what it called a “desperate plea” to the United States, Britain and France for anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft weapons and hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds.

Without such materiel, he warned, rebels may soon lose their hold on Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city located close to the Turkish border.

Syrian army, pro-regime militias, and Hezbollah fighters have reportedly been moving into positions around Aleppo in preparation for a major assault that could deliver a decisive blow against rebel forces in the northeastern part of the country.

The White House has come under growing pressure to escalate its involvement in the conflict from providing rebel forces with humanitarian and “non-lethal” assistance, ranging from medical supplies to night-vision goggles, to providing them with direct military support, whether by military intervention or by providing the kinds of arms requested by Idris.

That pressure has come both from the rebels’ backers in the region – notably, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have provided arms to the SMC and other rebel groups, including radical Sunni Islamist fighters, some reportedly associated with Al Qaeda – and from neo-conservative and other right-wing hawks in the media and Congress, chiefly Republican senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham.

They have been joined over the past weeks by a smattering of liberal interventionists, some of whom supported the 2003 Iraq invasion. But their biggest catch came this week when, at a private gathering with McCain, former president Bill Clinton said he agreed with the Arizona senator, calling Obama’s refusal so far to provide more support to the rebels a “big mistake”.

“Sometimes, it’s best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t over-commit,” Clinton said, echoing the off-the-record position of his wife, Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state reportedly argued last fall in favour of escalating U.S. military support for the rebels during a particularly intense internal administration debate.

As it grew clear in recent days that the opposition, in its weakened state, was adamantly opposed to participating in proposed U.S.- and Russian-backed peace talks in Geneva in the coming weeks, Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, has reportedly taken over from where she left off, urging the administration to take stronger action in order to level the playing field in advance of any negotiations.

Obama, whose concerns about deeper involvement in yet another Middle Eastern war appear to mirror those of the general public, according to recent polls, has until now resisted these pressures. But he also promised last year that he would escalate U.S. intervention if the Assad regime crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons.

“The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” Rhodes said Thursday, noting that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded with “high confidence” that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.

Between 100 to 150 people had died in these attacks, he said, noting that the estimate was “likely incomplete…[and] a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria that now totals more than 90,000 deaths”.

The use of chemical weapons had added to the urgency of the situation, he said, suggesting, however, that the increased involvement of Hezbollah and Iran was also a major factor in the White House announcement.

Precisely what kinds of additional – and presumably lethal – assistance Washington will provide the SMC, however, remains unclear and the source of continued debate within the administration.

Rhodes’s vagueness and his statement that the administration will now consult with Congress and its allies – Obama attends a Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland next week – suggested that the issue was far from settled.

In the past, senior officials have said they opposed providing shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles to the rebels for fear they could be transferred to or captured by Al Qaeda-affiliated elements in their ranks.

Rhodes indicated that that those concerns have diminished somewhat as Washington has stepped up its humanitarian and non-lethal military aid to the SMC.

“General Idris and the SMC we are comfortable working with,” he said.  “It’s been important to work through them while aiming to isolate some of the more extremist elements of the opposition, such as al Nusra. We now have those relationships. We now have that pipeline flowing.”

At least 93,000 people were killed in Syria’s conflict by the end of April this year, but the true number could be “potentially much higher”, the United Nations human rights office says.

The exact figure released on Thursday – 92,901 people – is much higher than the U.N.’s last death toll back in January, of 59,000 people.

“The constant flow of killings continues at shockingly high levels,” said Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights. “This is most likely a minimum casualty figure. The true number of those killed is potentially much higher.”

An average of more than 5,000 people have been killed every month since last July, while rural Damascus and Aleppo have recorded the highest tolls since November, the report said in its latest study compiling documented deaths.

Among the victims were at least 6,561 children, including 1,729 children younger than 10.

Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays, reporting from the U.N. headquarters in New York, described the figures as “staggering”.

The U.N. has not had much access to Syria, and therefore has been unable to count bodies. Instead, it carried out a statistical survey.

“They have gone through sources which had the names, dates and locations (of those killed),” our correspondent said, adding that the U.N. acknowledges it has “underreported the number of deaths”.

Rebel-led mass killing

Meanwhile, Syrian rebels reportedly killed at least 60 people, including civilian government loyalists, in a battle in Halta, a Sunni-majority village in the country’s east, activists said.

The fighting over the past few days targeted members of the Shia community, highlighting the increasingly sectarian nature of the country’s civil war.

The opposition fighters reportedly stormed and burned civilian homes in the village in the eastern Deir Azzor province.

The attack is said to be in retaliation for an earlier assault by Shias from Hatla that killed four opposition fighters.

A Syrian government official denounced the attack on the Shia-section of the Sunni-majority Hatla village as a “massacre” of civilians, the Associated Press news agency reported on Thursday.

A video posted online by rebels on Tuesday, entitled “The storming and cleansing of Hatla”, showed dozens of fighters carrying black flags celebrating and firing guns in the streets of a small town as smoke curled above several buildings.

Most armed rebels in Syria are from the country’s Sunni majority, while President Bashar al-Assad has retained core support among the minorities, including his own Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, along with Christians and Shia.

U.S. debates strategy

The alleged massacre came as the U.S. again debated how to help the Syrian opposition.

Addressing reporters with his British counterpart William Hague in Washington, US.. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that a political solution that would end the war and save Syria was still being sought.

The U.S. has weighed for months whether to give arms to the rebels, but the issue is now firmly on the table given increased involvement by Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese Shia group, and as Iran backs President Assad on the battlefield.

“We are focusing our efforts now on doing all that we can to support the opposition as they work to change the balance on the ground,” Kerry said at the joint news conference.

Kerry’s comments came as regime forces were reported to be preparing for a major offensive on rebel-held parts of the northern city of Aleppo.

The Obama administration is meeting this week on whether to arm the Syrian rebels, a topic that Kerry said he discussed with Hague.

The meetings come ahead of a G8 summit in Northern Ireland next week.

G8 leaders are expected to discuss a coordinated response to the Syrian conflict, and how to bring the rival sides together at a peace conference.

For his part, Hague said Britain, the U.S. and allies in Europe and the region – a group known as the London 11 that has met in Turkish and Jordanian cities – may need to step up their efforts to help the opposition.

Also on Wednesday, trouble flared on Syria’s borders, with Lebanese police saying that a Syrian helicopter fired rockets on Arsaal, a village in the country’s east, wounding at least two people.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

In Aleppo, Karm al Jabal. This neighbourhood is next to Al Bab and has been under siege for six months. Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Jun 1 2013 (IPS)

A series of reversals for Syria’s rebels this month has prompted its supporters here to call for much greater U.S. military intervention in the civil war in order to give them a stronger bargaining position in advance of any peace negotiations.

In particular, some opposition advocates here are calling for President Barack Obama to go beyond providing arms directly to selected rebel groups, an option that the administration has reportedly had under active consideration since reports surfaced last month that the Syrian army had used chemical weapons against rebels.“A no-fly zone has mission creep written all over it." – Joshua Landis

Given the current weakness of the opposition, they argue, it makes little sense to go into negotiations next month in Geneva with representatives of the government of President Bashar al-Assad – as proposed by both Washington and Moscow – without first trying to decisively turn the tide of battle.

“(T)he only hope for an acceptable political settlement in Syria lies in an intervention that would decisively shift the balance of Syria’s war – through arms supplies to the rebels and airstrikes to eliminate the regime’s air power” (emphasis added), declared the lead editorial in the Washington Post Friday.

“If Mr. Obama is unwilling to take such steps, he ought also to eschew diplomacy that makes his administration appear foolish as well as weak,” the Post’s hawkish editorial board wrote.

Many of the rebels’ advocates here are urging the creation of one or more “no-fly zones” over Syrian territory to protect the opposition and permit it to set up a rival government on Syrian territory that could then request additional military intervention by its Western and Arab allies.

“Such a government would be entitled to request assistance in its defence from those who recognise it,” according to Frederic Hof, a former State Department special adviser on Syria at the Atlantic Council, who spoke earlier this week as part of a panel that favoured strong U.S. military intervention at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).

“The United States and others would be entitled to offer defensive assistance to counter the (Bashar Al-) Assad insurgency and its foreign fighters.”

“This scenario would not preclude national unity negotiations between the new Syrian government and an entity in Damascus still recognised by Russia, Iran, and others,” according to Hof.

Hof’s proposal, as well as other options, came amidst a series of military, diplomatic and political reversals suffered by the opposition that have resulted in the perception that the Assad government – with critical help from key foreign backers, notably Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — has regained the offensive in the two-year-old civil war.

Hezbollah’s involvement in the fighting in and around the border town of Qusayr has enabled the government to secure key arms smuggling routes in and out of Lebanon and to re-open supply lines between Damascus and the Mediterranean coast, as well as northern provinces along the Turkish border, notably Latakia, Idlib and Aleppo.

Citing Germany’s chief intelligence officer, Charles Dunne, who heads Middle East programmes at Freedom House, wrote on CNN’s website that recent government advances on the ground meant that Assad’s rule “is more stable than any time in the last two years, and he is likely to retake the southern half of the country by the end of this year.”

Meanwhile, disarray in the opposition ranks was on vivid display during a meeting of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces in Istanbul this past week as Islamist and secular factions battled over control and representation at any Geneva peace conference, to the evident exasperation of their backers in the West and Gulf states.

That disarray was increasingly reflected in Syria itself as four of the leading rebel groups on the ground sharply criticised the continuing discord in Istanbul amidst reports of increased tension and actual fighting between units of the Free Syria Army and Islamist groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, filtered out of northern Syria.

While Britain and France managed to persuade the EU to lift its embargo on supplying arms to the rebels effective Aug. 1, Russia countered by announcing that it will proceed with the transfer to Damascus of its S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile system – widely considered one of the most potent anti-aircraft missile systems in the world.

While deployment of the system is unlikely before next year – assuming Moscow follows through with the transfer despite Israeli threats to destroy it on delivery – Russia’s announcement underlined its determination to trump any escalation of Western support for the rebels.

Moreover, the addition of S-300s to Syria’s already formidable air-defence system would make the implementation of a no-fly zone or similar action requiring U.S. and Western airpower that much more problematic, thus adding urgency to whether or not to intervene as urged by Hof and others.

The administration has so far confined its support to the rebels to humanitarian aid and “non-lethal” assistance – even while it has encouraged the Gulf states and Western Europe to provide arms directly – and has shown little enthusiasm for escalating its military involvement, to say the least.

When reports surfaced last week that it was indeed considering a no-fly zone, the Pentagon was quick to deny them, even while insisting that it is prepared for all contingencies.

At the USIP conference, Joseph Holliday, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, a spin-off of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), presented four options for implementing a no-fly zone, ranging from supplying rebels with advanced surface-to-air missiles to a direct U.S. air attack on Syria’s air-defense system, aircraft, and related infrastructure followed by U.S. and allied air patrols over parts of the country.

But whether these ideas can be sold to the administration or to a war-weary public – for which there is virtually no appetite for providing anything more than arms to the rebels, according to recent polls — there is far from a consensus on the no-fly zone.

“A no-fly zone has mission creep written all over it,” according to Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of the syriacomment.com blog “It does nothing to guarantee that the opposition would win, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that the ‘moderate’ opposition would get the jump on the Islamists and al-Qaeda, who are better positioned to exploit an Assad defeat, should it come.”

“In Libya, the no-fly zone turned into a no-Gadhafi zone within 48 hours, because the only way to stop the killing was to destroy Gadhafi and his military,” he told IPS. “There is no point in imposing a no-fly zone on Syria, if the U.S. air force is not willing to destroy the Assad regime and his military.”

Wayne White, a former senior Middle East State Department intelligence analyst, agreed that, as in Libya, a no-fly zone would likely expand into something more, particularly “with the rebels on the defensive and losing ground…”

Indeed, he said, “another argument against (a no-fly zone) now could be that regime forces are doing so well on the ground that they might be able to continue making gains against the rebels without air support – relying instead on tanks, other armoured vehicles, heavy artillery, and heavy mortar fire.”

The result, he said, would likely result in “aerial interdiction against all manner of regime military targets on the ground, making it an even more demanding affair.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Women walk past destroyed shops in Qusayr, Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS

By AJ Correspondents
DOHA, May 30 2013 (Al Jazeera)

Syria’s opposition will not participate in proposed international peace talks in Geneva next month, their leader has said.

George Sabra, the head of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), on Thursday said the opposition were suspending their participation until the international community intervened to end the siege in Qusayr, a town in Homs province near the Lebanese border.

“The National Coalition will not take part in any international conference or any such efforts so long as the militias of Iran and Hezbollah continue their invasion of Syria,” Sabra told reporters in Istanbul.

Khaled Saleh, the SNC spokesperson who addressed the news conference after Sabra, said civilians in the town had been “severely wounded” and Qusayr had been completely cut off by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

“Civilians have no access to water, electricity and the massacre continues minute by minute while the Assad regime continues to use weapons” it receives from allies, he said.

He said the United Nations and Arab League should intervene to stop the killings that the Lebanese group “Hezbollah is responsible for”.

The planned peace talks in Geneva are being arranged by Russia – a Syria ally – and the United States. The SNC had said earlier it would take part only if a peace process that led to Bashar al-Assad stepping down was put in place.

Russian missile

SNC’s announcement to boycott the talks came only hours after Assad said his country would respond to any Israeli attack on its soil.

In an interview to be aired on Thursday by Al-Manar TV station, owned by Hezbollah, Assad also said he had already received the first shipment of an advanced S-300 Russian missile system and would soon get the rest.

Gerald Steinburg, a professor of Political Studies at Bar-ilan University, told Al Jazeera that Israel was paying attention “closely” to what was happening in Syria. The comments were first published on Thursday by the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, which got excerpts of the interview.

“Syria has received the first shipment of Russian anti-aircraft S-300 rockets,” al-Akhbar quoted Assad as saying. “The rest of the shipment will arrive soon.”

Israel has suggested its military might strike the Russian S-300 missiles.

But he said Israel was not alarmed by shipments of arms to Syria.

“Mr Assad has got problems dealing with his own survival and that of his regime, so it is not really a major concern in Israel,” he said from Jerusalem.

Several foreign envoys had participated in the Istanbul meeting to help the opposition arrive at a decision.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said major powers also remained divided on who would take part in the talks or when they would be held.

Ban told reporters “active consultations” were still being held, while Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said the U.S. government’s “entire foreign policy apparatus” was working to hold the meeting.

The U.S. has also called on Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters from Syria immediately.

France says about 3,000 to 4,000 Hezbollah fighters are currently battling alongside regime troops in Syria.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Bashar Ja’afari, Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to the UN, addresses the Assembly on May 15. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 15 2013 (IPS)

When the 193-member General Assembly voted Wednesday to condemn the beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there was an increase in the number of sceptics who neither supported nor opposed the tottering regime in Damascus.

The resolution, which is legally non-binding, was adopted by a vote of 107-12, compared with 133-12 last August.

As the number of supporters to the resolution declined, from 133 to 107, the abstentions increased significantly, from 31 to 59, including a mix of Asian, African and Latin American countries.

The abstentions included Algeria, Bangladesh, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, El Salvador, Eritrea, Fiji, Kenya, Lebanon, Myanmar, Singapore, Sudan, South Sudan and Uruguay.

Asked for a response, Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International’s U.N. representative in New York, told IPS, “I think the number of abstentions – and the divisions in the General Assembly – are the consequence of political considerations.”

He said some countries would have preferred to give space to a renewed push for negotiations in the wake of the recent agreement between Russia and the United States, including a proposed international conference on Syria.

“They abstained because to vote ‘no’ would have been to side openly with Assad and to ignore the appalling crimes taking place in Syria,” Diaz said.

“All in all,” he said, “I don’t think there’s much disagreement among the vast majority of the General Assembly members – not counting the Syrian government and its supporters, like Russia, China and North Korea – about what is needed in Syria.”

As expected, China and Russia voted against the resolution, as they did in the Security Council when they exercised their vetoes on three Western-sponsored resolutions condemning the Syrian regime and the killing of civilians.

Besides Syria, China and Russia, the countries voting against the resolution included Bolivia, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Ecuador, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The resolution, drafted by Qatar and co-sponsored or backed by most of the Arab countries and Western powers, recognised the Syrian National Coalition as “effective representative interlocutors needed for a political transition” in Syria.

Unlike resolutions adopted by the Security Council, General Assembly resolutions are not legally enforceable.

Asked if the resolution will have any impact, Luis Diaz told IPS, “It probably won’t have an immediate impact, but one good thing would be if it builds pressure on the Security Council to take up the issue again and press for binding action.”

Lost in the highly political debate on the resolution text, he said, was the fact that it has the strongest language on accountability of any of the previous General Assembly resolutions on Syria.

Russia, which lobbied last week against the resolution, described it as “very harmful and destructive”.

Russia’s deputy permanent representative Ambassador Alexander Pankin said, “It’s particularly irresponsible and counterproductive to promote this when the United States and Russia reached a very important agreement … and need a unified approach.”

Early this week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Moscow and agreed on a proposed international conference on Syria.

U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo told delegates Tuesday that over the last 26 months “we have witnessed a brutal conflict in Syria”.

She said the Assad regime, drawing upon an arsenal of heavy weapons, aircraft, ballistic missiles, and potentially chemical weapons, has killed or injured untold numbers of civilians who for many months manifested their opposition purely through peaceful protest.

She said the sustained violence has created a severe humanitarian crisis with more than 1.4 million refugees and 4.25 million internally displaced persons within Syria.

“The consequences of this crisis are growing more dire not only within Syria, but across the region,” DiCarlo said.

She singled out the generosity of the governments and people of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and others who host large numbers of refugees “which has been extraordinary.”

“But these countries now face grave threats to their security and an overwhelming economic burden. It is clear that we need a Syrian-led peaceful political transition,” she added.

The surprise accord reached by the U.S. and Russia in Moscow Tuesday to try to convene an international conference to resolve the two-year-old civil war in Syria as soon as the end of this month has been greeted with equal measures of hope and scepticism.

If nothing else, the agreement apparently persuaded at least one key party, the UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, to put off his previously reported intention to resign in the very near future."It represents a more realistic hope for bringing a modicum of peace and stability to Syria in the foreseeable future than does stoking the civil war with more outside involvement in the military conflict." -- Paul Pillar

“This is the first hopeful news concerning that unhappy country in a very long time,” he said in a statement issued by his office Wednesday. “The statements made in Moscow constitute a very significant first step forward. It is nevertheless only a first step,” he added.

Analysts here, however, said that even with Tuesday’s accord, getting the two principal parties to the table would be extremely difficult under current circumstances.

“The more you learn about Syria, the more you realise how intractable the conflict is, and thus the more attractive a political solution appears to be,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “But you also realise the odds of putting one together are very long.”

The joint decision to revive the long-dormant Geneva Communique, which laid out the core elements of a political solution to the conflict war after a meeting of the U.N.-sponsored Action Group for Syria last June, was reached after deliberations between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The communique called for an immediate cease-fire, the creation of a transitional government mutually agreed by representatives of both the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and his opposition, and the holding of new parliamentary and presidential elections.

But the process never got underway, in part because of the opposition’s demand – tacitly and sometimes explicitly backed by Washington — that Assad step down as a pre-condition for any negotiation and Moscow’s firm rejection of that position.

But the administration of President Barack Obama appears to have narrowed its difference on that score with Moscow.

At the time, many U.S. analysts, particularly those on the hawkish side of the spectrum, believed that the balance of power on the ground was moving in the opposition’s direction, and that it was simply a matter of time – months, if not weeks — until the regime crumbled.

But after months of bloody stalemate, it appears that the government’s forces have recently regained the initiative by systematically retaking control of strategically located towns and cities.

“If that’s true, the administration may have assessments to that effect in hand and feels it’s worth a try to see if the opposition can be compelled to engage while it still holds a reasonably strong hand,” according to Wayne White, a former top Mideast analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Indeed, Kerry appears to have accepted Moscow’s position that Assad does not have to step down in order for negotiations to get underway.

“(I)t’s impossible for me as an individual to understand how Syria could possibly be governed in the future by the man who has committed the things we know that have taken place,” he said during a press conference with Lavrov after the meeting.

“But…I’m not going to decide that tonight, and I’m not going to decide that in the end, because the Geneva Communique says that the transitional government has to be chosen by mutual consent by the parties …the current regime and the opposition.”

For his part, Lavrov, without mentioning Assad by name, said he was “not interested in the fate of certain persons”.

While Damascus remained silent Wednesday about the prospects for a negotiation, some opposition leaders rejected the initiative, while others expressed deep scepticism.

“Syrians: be careful of squandering your revolution in international conference halls,” warned Moaz al-Khatib, a former leader of the Arab League-recognised National Opposition Coalition (NOC).

At the same time, Col. Qassim Saadeddine, a spokesman for the rebel Supreme Military Council (SMC), the U.S. backed group through which Washington is currently funnelling intelligence and “non-lethal” military aid to fighters in the field, told Reuters that he didn’t believe “there is a political solution left for Syria. …We will not sit with the regime for dialogue.”

Whether that was the opposition’s final word remains to be seen, according to analysts here who noted that Amb. Robert Ford, who accompanied Kerry in Moscow, was on his way to Istanbul to talk with opposition representatives, apparently in hopes of bringing them around to a more positive response.

U.S. officials said they were hoping that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, the rebels’ main regional backers, would also cooperate in helping to persuade opposition figures to come to the table.

Two weeks ago, Obama hosted Qatar’s emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, at the White House, when he reportedly stressed the importance of a political solution in Syria and called on his guest to cease providing military assistance to the more-radical Islamist factions in the opposition. He will also be meeting here with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the most important regional player, later this month to more closely align the two countries’ parties.

All of this comes amidst growing pressure here on Obama to escalate U.S. intervention in the crisis, particularly in the wake of still-unconfirmed reports that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons against rebel forces and growing fears that the war’s continuation threatens to destabilise neighbouring countries, particularly Lebanon and Iraq, as well as Jordan which is finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the more than 500,000 Syrian refugees who have flooded into the country.

Support is building in Congress for legislation calling on Obama to provide lethal military aid and training to the rebels, an option that the administration has said it is actively considering on its own if the chemical weapons charges are confirmed.

Obama has previously resisted increasing Washington’s military backing for the opposition and has tried to confine U.S. aid to humanitarian assistance, more than 500 million dollars of which has been provided to date.

Re-invigorating a diplomatic process for resolving the conflict thus looks increasingly attractive to the administration, although most analysts believe prospects for any immediate progress are dim.

“The chance of a diplomatic breakthrough coming out of the projected conference is at best modest,” according to Paul Pillar, a retired CIA veteran who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia.

“But it represents a more realistic hope for bringing a modicum of peace and stability to Syria in the foreseeable future than does stoking the civil war with more outside involvement in the military conflict. The fact that the United States and Russia could agree on any of this is a breakthrough of sorts,” he wrote in an email to IPS.

Landis agreed. “Whether the situation (for a successful negotiation) is ripe today is still debatable, because Assad still thinks he can win, and the opposition, with hundreds of militias, is too fragmented to negotiate,” he told IPS.

“But you have to get the international community open-minded to this kind of dialogue, and down the line, that may happen.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel briefs the press in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, April 25, 2013. Hagel announced that the U.S. intelligence community assesses with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons -- specifically the nerve-agent sarin -- on a small scale. Credit: DOD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Apr 26 2013 (IPS)

A White House letter Thursday to Congressional leaders suggesting chemical weapons use by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has reignited debate about direct U.S. military involvement in the war-torn country.

“Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin,” the letter said, a day after a letter by eight senators was sent to the president asking if chemical weapons had been used by the Assad regime since the conflict there began in 2011."This administration will likely remain well aware of the Colin Powell dictum: 'You break it; you own it'." -- Wayne White

Republican Senator John McCain, one of the co-signers of the letter to the White House, said Thursday that president Obama’s “red line” on Syria has been “crossed”.

“Not only have our intelligence people concluded that, but as importantly the Israeli, the British and the French have as well,” McCain said on Fox News.

“The president clearly stated that it was a red line and that it couldn’t be crossed without the United States taking vigorous action,” he said.
But it’s not clear whether the president’s red line has been crossed.

The White House is also seeking confirmation of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment before taking action.

“…Precisely because the president takes this issue so seriously, we have an obligation to fully investigate any and all evidence of chemical weapons use within Syria,” the White House letter said before calling for a U.N. investigation to “credibly evaluate the evidence and establish what took place”.

“There was wiggle room [in the letter] about who might have been actually doing it,” Robert E. Hunter, who served on the National Security Council staff throughout the Jimmy Carter administration, told IPS.

“That letter is a wonderful weasel-worded letter to try to make the president look good and preserve all options. And I don’t mean the option to go to war, I mean the option to not go to war,” said Hunter, who was U.S. ambassador to NATO from 1993-98.

“It’s not clear to me that the administration has figured out what’s in the best American interest after period X…because we’ve been ambivalent about that or because in the president’s statement it says Assad ought to go, then if that’s where you are, what are you prepared to do to see it come about, and if it does come about, then what are you prepared to do?” said Hunter.

“You can arm the rebels, you can have a no-fly zone, you can use air power…we now have a capacity to use air power at relatively low risk. But that still begs the question: then what happens? How do you protect the minority if Assad goes? How do you keep this from becoming a spill-over into what I call a slow-rolling civil war throughout this part of the Middle East,” he said.

“It does not appear that the proverbial Obama administration ‘red line’ has been crossed – yet – because there clearly are some differences about the level of certainty within the U.S. intelligence community over whether regime lethal chemical weapons (CW) use has taken place,” Wayne White, a former deputy director of the State Department’s Middle East/South Asia Intelligence Office (INR/NESA), told IPS.

“Also at issue is whether, if this has occurred, the incident was significant or relatively isolated and minor, as well as whether the level of danger that any such use would be repeated,” said White, now a scholar at the Middle East Institute.

There is meanwhile differing opinion among U.S. Mideast policy experts about whether Washngton should militarily intervene in Syria, something which the Obama administration has so far resisted.

“It doesn’t really matter which intelligence assessment – Israeli or American – is accurate, this is no longer an academic question. The U.S. and its allies, in or outside the U.N., must act swiftly to bring down the regime and prevent any further use of chemical weapons by the regime,” Emile Nakhleh, a an expert on Middle Eastern society and politics who served in the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993-2006, told IPS.

“It is time the Obama administration acts on its own to speed up Assad’s fall. If the president had followed his earlier statement that Assad should go, the Syrian people would have been spared the horrible destruction that the regime has inflicted on the country, the deaths of almost 100,000 people, and the flight of almost three million Syrians as refugees to neighbouring countries.

“More importantly, such action would have removed the possibility of the regime using weapons of mass destruction against the Syrian people,” Nakhleh, who formerly headed the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Programme, told IPS.

The White House’s letter release Thursday coincided with a library dedication ceremony for President George W. Bush, which was attended by all living U.S. presidents including Obama.

Bush spoke highly of his two-term presidency, which included U.S.-waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“…We liberated nations from dictatorship and freed people from AIDS. And when our freedom came under attack, we made the tough decisions required to keep the American people safe,” said Bush at the library dedication ceremony on the campus of SMU in Dallas, Texas.

But successive polls show little support now by U.S. citizens for involvement in another Mideast war.

In December 2013, a Pew Research poll showed that 65 percent of respondents opposed the U.S. and its allies even sending arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria.

“The Obama administration, already heavily committed in Afghanistan, addressing significant military-related budget cuts, and well aware of the need to avoid an Iraq-like scenario, will move with much greater caution in dealing with Syria than did the Bush administration (which eagerly sought an all-out war with Iraq) back in 2003,” White told IPS.

“Particularly with Islamic extremists (in fact, many directly affiliated with Al-Qaeda) important players in the complex situation on the ground in Syria, this administration will likely remain well aware of the Colin Powell dictum: ‘You break it; you own it’,” said White.

“Syria already is, in effect, broken, but the U.S. so far has played only a marginal role in determining the flow of events there. Indeed, so far, this remains very much a Syrian conflict, despite the involvement of various outside governments (including Iran),” he said.