WarSclerotic

Syria plunged in bloodbath

Saturday, April 23 saw the constantly mounting uprising against the Assad regime finally reaching the Syrian capital Damascus where debkafile reports 300,000 – 15 percent of the city’s dwellers – took the streets shouting: “Bashar Assad you are a traitor!” That day too the Syrian ruler unleashed his security forces for the harshest crackdown yet in order to break the back of the five-week civil uprising. The result: 350 dead, tripling the number of Friday’s bloodbath and thousands of injured.

Early Sunday, secret service thugs hauled thousands of protesters out of their homes. They broke down doors in the Harasta and Ghouta districts of Damascus, dragged their victims out and dumped them on covered trucks which drove off to unknown destinations. Ghouta is the ancient garden quarter of Damascus.
The growing number of injured are condemned to being treated privately or not at all. The authorities have commandeered ambulances to prevent them reaching hospital and hospital wards are raided by security agents who eitheir kill the wounded or arrest them.
debkafile‘s military and intelligence sources reported that Assad will decide finally at noon Sunday, April 24, whether to muster all 11 divisions of his army and let them loose on the uprising. We reported Friday that the embattled Syrian president had ordered the troops to start moving into the cities the next day. Our sources later reported that he reversed his order at the last minute, reluctant to throw his last card into his desperate bid for survival for fear of a fatal backlash. Some units had already left their bases and remain parked outside the targeted cities awaiting orders to go in.
As the unrest against his rule gains ground, the Syrian president’s options are shrinking. Small numbers of security forces can no longer venture into some of the more troubled areas of the country where armed protesters reign unless accompanied by large-scale strength with massive fire power.
debkafile reported Friday night:
Syrian army units were already sighted heading towards the cities, joined for the first time by troops normally on duty on at the Syrian-Israel border.
debkafile‘s military sources disclose their assignments:

Corps No. 1 was given responsibility for the capital Damascus and its outlying towns and districts;

Corps No. 2 was to take charge of central Syria and the towns of Aleppo, Homs and Hama;

Corps No. 3 was to spread out in the south and Jebel Druze.

It was the last straw for Assad when Friday, the strategic town of Katana west of Damascus was drawn into the protest movement and rallied against his regime. Katana houses the main bases of the Syrian armored corps, which is part of the 7th Division, and serves as divisional logistical administration center. Its population is made up mostly of the officers, men and civilian personnel serving at those bases.

Having Katana turn against the regime finally persuaded its leaders to throw every resource it had into crushing the uprising.

For the Syrian ruler, deploying the entire army is a wild gamble because more than 75 percent of Syria’s 220,000-strong rank and file are Sunni Muslims, Kurds and Druzes and therefore drawn from ethnic and religious groups long repressed by the Alawite-dominated regime.  Uniformed troops might well flout orders to shoot live rounds into crowds of protesters who are members of their community or even family. It would start the break-up of the Syrian army amid large-scale defections of officers and men.