Syrian boy carries bread back from underground bakery in severely damaged opposition-held area of Aleppo (August 2014). Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
ALEPPO, Syria, Aug 11 2014 (IPS)

The single, heavily damaged supply road remaining into the rebel-held, eastern area of the city is acutely exposed to enemy fire.

All lorries with wheat for the areas’ underground bakeries, soap for hygiene purposes, and fuel for vehicles and generators travel by this route. While snipers focus on this road and other frontlines throughout the city, regime barrel bombing is meanwhile steadily, painfully reducing the rest of the city to rubble.

Although many areas are now under the control of the more moderate Islamic Front, Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra helps provide for basic needs in some areas where the underfunded Syrian National Council-linked administration is unable to do so.While snipers focus on this road [the only remaining supply road into the rebel-held, eastern area of the city] and other frontlines throughout the city, regime barrel bombing is meanwhile steadily, painfully reducing the rest of the city to rubble

IPS watched as members of the armed group handed out metre-long rectangular blocks of ice, after they slid down a metal shaft to armed men waiting to give them to inhabitants waiting nearby who have been without electricity and running water for months.

‘’They’re good people,’’ said one inhabitant of the city, who nonetheless had been arrested by them for undisclosed reasons a few months back. ‘’They’re friends.’’

In private, however, many Syrians will say that they are not happy with the group, though it is ‘’not anywhere near as bad as ‘Daeesh’ (the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS).”

Inside the Aleppo city council offices, bright red filing cabinets and a new coat of white paint mark a sharp contrast with the crumbling buildings and concrete slabs hanging precariously above streets where those left continue to go about their daily affairs as best they can.

‘’We have been hit many times, but we need to show that we will keep rebuilding,’’ one employee said.

Council chief Abdelaziz Al-Maghrebi, a former teacher and manager at a textile factory, walks with a limp from what he says was an injury from a tank bomb never properly treated.

The council has civil registry, education, legal affairs and civil defence directorates – and an office for electricity, water, sewage, and rubbish – but often receives no money from the ‘government-in-exile’, said Mohammed Saidi, financial manager of the council.

‘’The amount of money depends on the month, and no money was received from the SNC in July.’’

However, Saidi stressed, all reports of siphoning off of money by members ‘’are false’’.

Private donors and foundations play a large part in the council’s budget as well, and ‘’funding depends on the project proposals that are accepted’’, he said.

One of the recent proposals was for underground shelters, which the head of the civil defence directorate – established at the council only recently after long acting as an entirely volunteer force – told IPS had been granted four months ago, and 16 of which had since been built.

For medical needs, doctor Ibrahim Alkhalil, head of the Aleppo health directorate for rebel areas, said that as doctors and hospitals continue to be targeted, the location of medical facilities ‘’has to be kept confidential and change frequently’’.

The doctor, who is Syrian but who spent most of his professional career in Saudi Arabia and only came back after the uprising started, noted that everything was in short supply or lacking entirely: antibiotics, water, electricity and trained staff.

He added that the lack of maintenance for vehicles and the terrible road conditions meant that many people were dying simply from being unable to reach the few existing medical centres.

Moreover, the local council can afford to provide funds only to some medical facilities that do not receive any from other donors, council chief Al-Maghrebi told IPS.

Alkhalil pointed out, however, that no amount of supplies would solve the main problem if ‘’the regime isn’t stopped from killing and injuring in the first place.’’

A truck with lights switched off to avoid attracting regime aircraft attention often makes its way through the streets of a central neighbourhood at night, calling out ‘haleeb’, ‘haleeb’ (‘milk’).

A number of children in the area have been hit by snipers while crossing a street now ‘protected’ by a bullet-riddled sheet of canvas meant to reduce visibility.

In another area, Salahheddin – the ‘first liberated area of Aleppo’ and the very name of which retains a sort of mythical status in the eyes of some – children laugh and play soccer in the empty street near the frontline after nightfall. The blood of a boy hit by a sniper recently still stains the ground nearby.

Despite the constant risk of government snipers, IPS was told, near the frontlines was often the ‘’safest place, since it is too close to regime areas for them to drop barrel bombs on.’’

IPS was asked by a freckled, red-haired boy barely out of his late teens now working for a local Muslim, ‘’Why have you come here? What is there left to say?’’

The boy works to get charities abroad to help his organisation provide 50 dollars per month to the neediest widows and orphans of those killed in the fighting and for food packages.

A barrel bomb outside the charity’s offices killed a good friend and co-worker about 15 days ago. Sandbags are now stacked in front of windows and, according to another volunteer, over half of the staff left immediately after the incident, either for other parts of the country or for Turkey – or they simply no longer come to the office out of fear, a niqab-clad woman also working at the organisation said.

The charity has an underground bakery with which it normally provides bread to those in need, but its equipment had broken down a few days prior to IPS’s visit. It was unclear when it would be fixed, whether the spare parts needed could be brought into the city, and whether the regime might soon take the one road left in.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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.”