The Syrian independence flag flies over a large gathering of protesters in Idlib. Credit: Freedom House/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 18 2013 (IPS)

Despite U.S. and Western pressure on the opposition to take part in U.N.-sponsored talks aimed at halting the two-and-a-half-year-old Syrian civil war, most experts here believe the rebels are unlikely to show up any time soon. And even if they do, the results will be unlikely to change much of anything on the ground.

The so-called “Geneva 2” negotiations, which are aimed at reaching an agreement on a political transition to eventually replace President Bashar Al-Assad, are supposed to take place toward the end of next month.“Today, Geneva 2 is a figleaf designed to conceal the fact that most Western countries are coming to the conclusion that they don’t want to see any side win." -- Joshua Landis

But analysts here believe the disarray within the opposition and its increasingly apparent inability to represent rebel factions — particularly radical Islamist factions, two of the most prominent of which are linked to Al-Qaeda and have always rejected international negotiations designed to end the conflict — that are leading the actual fighting on the ground could make the conference irrelevant, if it indeed takes place.

“More and more, the armed groups on the ground are renouncing ties to the political opposition and are explicitly opposed to a Geneva conference,” Mona Yacoubian, a Middle East specialist at the Stimson Centre, told IPS here.

“It’s very difficult to assert that holding it within the next six weeks is a realistic alternative, but it’s also a very important goal to work toward, understanding that there really are no appealing alternatives in the face of a situation on the ground that continues to get worse,” she said.

Indeed, with well over 100,000 people estimated to have been killed and another two million who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries, the increasingly sectarian conflict in Syria appears more and more intractable, even as the Assad government appears to be cooperating with U.N. efforts that got underway last month to destroy its formidable chemical arsenal.

“We are at a stalemate, and anybody who looks at this objectively today sees that Syria is being effectively partitioned,” according to Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of the widely read Syria Comment blog.

While Assad continues to rule over the western and southern half of the country, the north and east are being run by various rebel militias – some of which find themselves increasingly in conflict with each other.

Kurdish militias have gained control of the country’s northeastern corner, although recent clashes between them and radical Islamist factions – many of them dominated by foreign fighters – have sent thousands of refugees over the border to Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Today, Geneva 2 is a figleaf designed to conceal the fact that most Western countries are coming to the conclusion that they don’t want to see any side win,” Landis told IPS. “And, rather than say we don’t want to see a winner, they’re looking for a political solution, but that will be extremely difficult to broker.”

Syria’s deputy prime minister, Qadri Jamil, said Thursday during a visit to Moscow that the talks should take place Nov. 23-24, but his Russian hosts, who, along with Washington, have been pushing hard for the conference to take place, declined to endorse those dates.

Echoing Landis, Jamil, who, despite his government post, has insisted he will take part in negotiations as part of the opposition, stressed that the conflict has reached a “military and political dead end.” The negotiations, he said, offered a “way out for everyone: the Americans, Russia, the Syrian regime and the opposition.”

Opposition backers in the region – most importantly, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar — had hoped that a chemical attack against rebel positions in suburban Damascus that Washington claimed killed more than 1,400 people would trigger a U.S. and Western military intervention that would shift the balance of power on the battlefield decisively in the rebels’ favour.

But when that failed to materialise – due both to the clear reluctance of President Barack Obama to involve the U.S. in yet another Middle Eastern civil war and unexpectedly strong public opposition, as well as the 11^th-hour agreement between the U.S. and Russia, Assad’s most important external backer, on a U.N. plan to dismantle Damascus’ chemical arsenal – those hopes evaporated.

Indeed, by recognising and even praising Assad’s cooperation in dismantling his weapons, the U.S. appears to have boosted the Syrian president’s diplomatic position even as it continues to insist publicly that his replacement by a transitional government with full executive powers remains the goal of the Geneva negotiations.

But, according to a new report released Thursday by the International Crisis Group (ICG), the most credible political opposition that could take part in the talks, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, lacks sufficient influence inside Syria to truly represent the various rebel factions, including even those who are not tied to Al-Qaeda.

Described by the ICG as a “hodgepodge of exiles, intellectuals and secular dissidents bereft of a genuine political constituency, as well as Muslim Brothers geographically detached from their natural base,” the Coalition, like its regional backers, had relied heavily on Western military intervention similar to that which eventually overthrew the regime of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

But “(f)or the Obama administration, such direct military intervention never appears truly to have been in the cards,” according to the report. “Instead it saw the priority as getting the opposition to unite and present a more broadly appealing vision of the post-Assad future.”

“In contrast, the opposition saw value in those tasks … only insofar as they were accompanied by substantially more Western support. Washington waited for the opposition to improve itself; the opposition waited for Washington to empower it. Both shared the goal of a Syria without Assad, but neither developed a strategy to achieve the goal that took account of the other’s constraints, triggering a cycle of frustration and mistrust that discredited the political opposition and Western governments alike in the eyes of the uprising’s rank and file.”

Even more damaging, according to the report, has been the lack of coordination among its regional supporters which in turn helped spur the rise of extremist groups – most of them financed by private funding from the Gulf states — within the rebel ranks. The Supreme Military Council (SMC), which is represented in the Coalition and has become the recipient of most humanitarian and military aid and training provided by Western countries, including the U.S., “enjoys scant leverage on the ground,” according to the report.

Instead of creating a new group, however, the Coalition’s foreign backers should urgently improve their coordination, especially on the military front; press Gulf states and Turkey to curb private support for radical groups; and urge the Coalition to focus more on providing basic services and strengthening activist networks in rebel-held areas — in part to better challenge and confront jihadi groups – and on “reaching internal consensus on workable negotiation parameters” for the Geneva track which “remains the best hope for ending the war.”

“I assume Assad will send someone to Geneva, and the Coalition will, too, because no one wants America to blame them for boycotting,” Landis said. “But it will all be a fig leaf for what is becoming the de facto partition of Syria, because that’s what’s happening on the ground.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Syrian activists claim that government forces have carried out a “poisonous gas” attack in suburbs of the capital, Damascus, leaving hundreds of people dead.

Activists said regime forces fired “rockets with poisonous gas heads” in the alleged attack early on Wednesday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the shelling was intense and hit the eastern suburbs of Zamalka, Arbeen and Ein Tarma.

It said at least 100 were killed, while the Local Coordination Committees said hundreds of people were killed or injured in the shelling.

The attack coincided with the visit by a 20-member U.N. chemical weapons team to Syria to investigate three sites where chemical weapons attacks allegedly occurred over the past year.

Syrian authorities dismissed reports of a chemical attack on Wednesday as “baseless”, and said the reports were intended to hinder the mission of U.N. inspectors.

The main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, accused the regime of killing more than 650 people on Wednesday.

“Over 650 confirmed dead result of deadly chemical weapon attack in Syria,” the National Coalition said on Twitter.

The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Al Jazeera’s Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from neighbouring Jordan, said there were videos allegedly showing both children and adults in field hospitals, some of them suffocating, coughing and sweating.

“We have been receiving reports that the doctors in the field hospitals do not have the right medication to treat these cases and that they were treating people with vinegar and water,” she said.

Call for U.N. probe

The head of the U.N. chemical weapons inspectors in Syria said that reports of the gas attack should be investigated.

Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom told news agency TT that while he had only seen TV footage, from which nothing could be determined, the high number of casualties reported sounded “suspicious”.

The Syrian National Coalition has called for an urgent U.N. Security Council meeting after the deadly attack.

“I call on the Security Council to convene urgently,” National Coalition leader Ahmed al-Jarba told Al-Arabiya news channel, condemning the Syrian army’s bombardment of the suburbs of Damascus as a “massacre.”

He urged the U.N. team now in Syria to visit the site.

In Cairo, the Arab League also urged the U.N. inspectors to visit the site of the alleged attack immediately. And Saudi Arabia as well urged the U.N. and EU ministers to immediately address the “massacre”.

UK said it would raise the reported chemical weapons attack at the U.N. Security Council and called on Damascus to give U.N. inspectors access to the site.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that hundreds of people, including children, have been killed in airstrikes and a chemical weapons attack on rebel-held areas near Damascus,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement.

France will also ask U.N. experts to visit the site of the alleged chemical attack in Syria, a French government spokesman said.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

With Syrian government forces and their allies scoring a major victory over Western- and Gulf Arab-backed rebel forces this week, neo-conservatives and other anti-Damascus hawks are trying hard to turn up the pressure on President Barack Obama to sharply escalate U.S. support for the opposition.

Sen. John McCain has been the most outspoken Congressional proponent of military action in Syria. Credit: Dan Raustadt/cc by 2.0

But their appeals appear increasingly to be falling on deaf ears, not only in a White House which has long been reluctant to intervene in yet another Muslim country, but also on an electorate that, according to the latest polling, is turning increasingly non-, if not anti-, interventionist, particularly regarding the Middle East.

Indeed, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released Friday, only 28 percent of respondents said they believe that Washington has a “responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria”, while 61 percent rejected that notion.

Similarly, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday found that only 15 percent of respondents said they favoured taking military action, or providing arms directly to the rebels (11 percent) – the latter, an option the administration has said it has been actively considering for two months.

Another 42 percent said they preferred to confine U.S. involvement to humanitarian assistance (of which the U.S. has been made the main financier), while 24 percent favoured no action at all.

In what was billed as a major policy address at the Brookings Institution Thursday, Republican Sen. John McCain, who, along fellow-Republican Lindsay Graham, has been the most outspoken Congressional proponent of military action, vented his frustration with both Obama and the public.

“I’ve puzzled for nights figuring out why it is the president will not act more decisively in the face of the events that are taking place,” he said, warning that “the entire Middle East is now up for grabs, and our enemies are fully committed to winning.

“What is more disturbing, however, is how little most Americans seem to care,” said McCain, who last week became the highest-ranking elected official to visit rebel-held territory.

“Most are weary of war and eager to focus on domestic issues. But some hold a more cynical view: they see the Middle East as a hopeless quagmire of ancient hatreds, and a huge distraction from worthier priorities…”

He spoke amidst confirmation that the strategic rebel-held border town of Al-Qusayr, which sits at a critical crossroads connecting Damascus with Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and points further north, including Aleppo, had fallen to the Syrian army and hundreds of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters who joined the fight in April.

Analysts in the region described the government victory, the most important of a series of recent regime advances around Damascus, near the Golan region, and along the main highway to Jordan, as primarily tactical, but one that could signal a tipping point in the war.

“For the past six months, the two sides have been in a situation of dynamic equilibrium,” Yesid Sayigh, a Syria expert at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said this week at a briefing organised by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). “We may be entering a phase in which the equilibrium will tip …and in the regime’s favour.

“Between now and the end of the year, we could see the armed opposition in complete disarray,” he said, noting that the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) was “on the verge of collapse” while its Western and Arab League backers, the “Friends of Syria”, are “clearly getting cold feet” about increasing their support.

While the White House insisted that the situation was not so dire, increasingly exasperated hawks, who have long favoured strong U.S. military intervention short of putting “boots on the ground”, described it in more apocalyptic — and global — terms.

Insisting that Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s intervention in the battle for Al-Qusayr was decisive to the outcome, the Washington Post’s hard-line neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called the battle “a huge victory not just for Tehran but also for Moscow,” Assad’s biggest arms supplier.

The losers, he said, included Turkey, Jordan, Washington’s Gulf allies, as well as the U.S. itself “whose bystander president” failed to take measures long favoured by the hawks, including “arming the rebels, helping Turkey maintain a safe zone in northern Syria, grounding Assad’s murderous air force by attacking airfields – all the way up to enforcing a no-fly zone by destroying the regime’s air-defense system”.

According to Krauthammer, Obama also failed to “understand that if America is completely hands-off, it invites hostile outside intervention.”

Similarly, Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which played a key role in the march to war in Iraq and also championed the U.S. intervention in Libya, depicted Obama’s failure to provide critical support to the rebels as a potentially catastrophic abdication of Washington’s historic role of “keep(ing) the worst from happening in the Middle East.”

“It would be rash to draw too many conclusions from a fight over a town of just 30,000 residents,” he wrote in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, “but the specter that looms is nothing less than the near-complete collapse of the U.S. position in the Middle East.”

Indeed, many independent analysts are increasingly concerned that the spill-over effects and internationalisation of Syria’s civil war risk further destabilising the entire Levant, including Iraq.

However, they also fail to see how any U.S. military action, short of invasion and occupation, can make a decisive and beneficial difference, particularly given the disunity within rebel ranks and the important presence among them of radical Islamist groups that are at least as hostile to the U.S. and Israel as Iran and Hezbollah, if not more so.

Even many of McCain’s fellow Republicans, including the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, appear leery of any military involvement, including providing “lethal” assistance to the rebels (in addition to the “non-lethal” aid, such as body armour and night-vision goggles, already being provided offered by the administration).

A measure of the dismay felt by McCain and some other hawks is their praise for Obama’s most recent appointments – U.N. Amb. Susan Rice as his new national security adviser and Samantha Power to replace Rice at the U.N.

Long considered humanitarian interventionists, both Rice and Power, who served as a top National Security Council (NSC) official during Obama’s first term, were reported to have played key roles, along with Hillary Clinton, in persuading the president to intervene in Libya, the most oft-cited precedent McCain and others have cited for any Syria intervention.

“I want to work with them,” McCain said Thursday.

But even if they lean in McCain’s direction, they would face an uphill fight given the current political mood, as described by Michael Hirsh in the latest edition of The National Journal, entitled “The New Isolationism.”

Not only has there been “virtually a reversal of direction” in the public from the “neo-conservative strain of a decade ago,” according to Hirsh, but “(t)he idea of ‘humanitarian intervention that dominated policy debates before 9/11 has become, for the Obama team, the ‘notion that we shouldn’t just do things to make us feel better,’ in the words of one administration official.”

*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.

More than 100 countries have recognised a new Syrian opposition coalition, opening the way for greater assistance to the forces fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad, including possibly military aid.

Backing for the Syrian National Coalition, formed in Qatar in November, was given at an international conference of the “Friends of the Syrian People” in Morocco on Wednesday.

The opposition had been under intense international pressure to create a more organised and representative body to channel any aid extended by foreign countries.

While the coalition welcomed the move, the opposition said they were looking for more tangible political and financial backing and that they want members of Assad’s government to be brought to the International Criminal Court.

International recognition of the Libyan opposition gave it a huge boost in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi last year, and was later backed by Western air strikes.

Military intervention does not appear to be in the cards for Syria, where the government has the powerful backing of Russia, China and Iran.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the meeting in Marrakesh had made “extraordinary progress”.

He noted that the European Union is now renewing its weapons embargo on Syria every three months, rather than annually, to be more flexible as the situation on the ground changes.

“We want to have the ability to continue or to change our attitude on this point,” he said.

“The fact that the coalition, which is asking for the right to defend itself, is now being recognised by a hundred countries – yesterday the U.S. and first France – I think this is a very important point.”

Chemical warning

The conference’s final statement said Assad had lost all legitimacy but stopped short of calling for him to step down, something attending ministers did say individually.

The statement also warned that any use of chemical weapons “would draw a serious response” from the international community.

“I believe that of all the meetings we have had so far for the friends of Syria, this will turn out to be the most significant,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said at the final news conference.

The conference members also announced new humanitarian assistance for Syrians, including $100m from Saudi Arabia and a fund to be managed by Germany and the United Arab Emirates for the reconstruction of the country after Assad falls.

‘Political solution’

Western countries have been reluctant to send arms to Syria, not the least because of their experience in Libya, where the West actively backed one side in a civil war in a country that later became awash with armed groups.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO secretary general, said from Brussels that international recognition of the Syrian opposition coalition was a “step in the right direction of a political solution”.

“Clearly, there is no military solution to the conflict in Syria – we need a political solution,” he told Al Jazeera. “We don’t have any intention to intervene militarily.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that recognition of the Syrian opposition coalition contradicts earlier international agreements aimed at starting a Syria dialogue that would include all sides in the conflict.

Germany’s lower house of parliament will debate whether to send patriot missiles and 400 soldiers to the Turkish-Syrian border.

Germany is considering arming the border at Turkey’s request to keep the war in Syria from spilling over.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.