WarSclerotic

Syria’s army has advanced into the southern city of Deraa, with tanks being used to back troops, according to activists and unverified video footage.

One activist was quoted as saying that security forces were “firing in all directions”, and at least five people were reportedly killed.

Witnesses also said security forces had opened fire in a suburb of Damascus.

A prominent human rights campaigner said President Bashar al-Ashad had launched a “savage war” on protesters.

There have been numerous reports of crackdowns and arrests around Syria over recent days, despite the lifting of an emergency law last week.

On Sunday, at least 13 people were reported to have been killed in the north-western city of Jabla, while dozens of protesters died on Friday.

Deraa is the city in which protesters began calling for political reforms last month. Many are now demanding that President Assad step down.

‘Electricity cut’

One activist told the BBC that in Deraa on Monday, tanks had surrounded al-Omari mosque in the old city and security forces were removing dead bodies from the street.

AFP news agency quoted an activist as saying that an estimated 3,000 members of the security forces had entered Deraa, and snipers had been firing from roofs.

Another activist, Abdullah al-Harriri, told AFP: “The men are firing in all directions and advancing behind the armour which is protecting them,” he said.

“Electricity is cut off and telephone communications are virtually impossible.”

Several reports said that at least five people had been killed.

Foreign journalists have been prevented from entering the country, making information hard to verify.

But the BBC’s Owen Bennett-Jones in neighbouring Lebanon says the use of tanks has not been reported elsewhere in Syria, and would mark a scaling up in the government’s response to protests.

It appears from the latest reports that the government is absolutely determined to use force to suppress the protest movement, he says.

A leading Syrian campaigner, Suhair al-Atassi, said authorities had launched “a savage war designed to annihilate Syria’s democrats”.

Gateway to south

Deraa, where several officials have resigned in protest against the killing of demonstrators, is the main city of Syria’s Hawran region.

Situated just a few miles from the border with Jordan, it has long been a gateway to the south.

Many in the north-western town of 80,000 are members of the same Alawite minority as President Assad, and they have generally avoided joining protests until now.

The authorities have reacted erratically to demonstrations – sometimes promising to allow more democracy and freedoms, and other times opening fire on demonstrators.

At least 95 people were reported killed across Syria on Friday and a further 12 on Saturday, as mourners came under fire.

In total, more than 350 people have been killed since demonstrations started in March, activists say.

Campaign group Human Rights Watch called for a UN inquiry and international sanctions against Syria following Friday’s killings, while Western governments have become louder in their criticism of the Syrian government.

US President Barack Obama spoke on Friday of the “outrageous use of violence to quell protests”.

Stuxnet called cyber warfare’s ‘Little Boy’.

Analyst says hope may rest in ‘mutually assured destruction’ doctrine

Posted: April 24, 2011
5:20 pm Eastern

© 2011 WorldNetDaily

Little Boy and Fat Man

Have Little Boy and Fat Man, the nuclear devices dropped on Japan to end World War II in Asia and the Pacific, been replaced by Stuxnet? The question is raised in a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Analysts who have viewed the Stuxnet virus, which sabotaged the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, call its use a watershed moment in cyber warfare, because it was the first instance of a specially designed cyber weapon used to attack the industrial infrastructure of a sovereign nation.

The success of the attack has demonstrated that cyber attacks can be not only successful but devastating.

Ralph Langner, an independent cyber security expert based in Germany, and his team of experts, analyzed the code contained in the Stuxnet virus and were surprised by what they found.

Before Stuxnet, viruses were created by hackers and unleashed onto the Internet without concern for the damage they caused.

But Stuxnet was a revolutionary design that only attacked specific electronic components configured in a particular way. In this instance, the target was centrifuges designed for a nuclear plant.

Langner’s analysis showed the virus to be of a highly advanced design.

According to Langner, “code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept, it is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”

In a recent article, David Gerwitz, the cyber terrorism adviser for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, argues that the Stuxnet virus has ushered in an era in warfare and will spark a virtual arms race similar to how Hiroshima sparked the nuclear arms race.

Gerwitz calls the Stuxnet virus the “Little Boy and Fat Man of the digital age,” in reference to the two atomic weapons used by the United States against Japan in World War II.

Little Boy was only 28 inches by 10 feet long, but it weighed in at 8,900 pounds, including its enriched uranium core. It delivered an estimated 16 kilotons of explosive power. Fat Man, 60 inches by 128 inches, was 10,300 pounds, including its plutonium center, and delivered 21 Kt of explosives.

Both were costly and difficult to develop. But computer viruses can be created by nearly any group, individual or state.

Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.

Read more: Stuxnet called cyber warfare’s ‘Little Boy’ http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=290221#ixzz1KWu0lgGD

Iran reveals second Internet virus attacking country’s nuclear program (UPDATE) | Iran | Trend.

(Go ISRAEL !! Unit 8200 strikes again…  )

Iran says it has detected second cyber attack | Reuters.

(Reuters) – Iran has been targeted by a second computer virus in a “cyber war” waged by its enemies, its commander of civil defense said on Monday.

Gholamreza Jalali told the semi-official Mehr news agency that the new virus, called “Stars,” was being investigated by experts.

“Fortunately, our young experts have been able to discover this virus and the Stars virus is now in the laboratory for more investigations,” Jalali was quoted as saying. He did not specify the target of Stars or its intended impact.

“The particular characteristics of the Stars virus have been discovered,” Jalali said. “The virus is congruous and harmonious with the (computer) system and in the initial phase it does minor damage and might be mistaken for some executive files of government organisations.”

Jalali warned that the Stuxnet worm, discovered in computers at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor last year, still posed a potential risk. Some experts described it as the world’s first “guided cyber missile,” aimed at Iran’s atomic program.

Iranian officials said they had neutralized Stuxnet before it did the intended damage to its nuclear facilities. They blamed Israel and the United States — which believe Iran is seeking nuclear weapons — for the virus.

Iran says its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.

STUXNET RISK

The existence of Stuxnet became public knowledge around the time that Iran began loading fuel into Bushehr, its first nuclear reactor, last August. Iran said in September that staff computers at Bushehr had been hit but that the plant itself was unharmed.

Bushehr is still not operational, having missed several start-up deadlines. This has prompted speculation that Stuxnet damaged the plant, something Iran denies.

Officials have said the virus could have posed a major risk had it not been discovered and dealt with before any major damage was done.

Some defense analysts say the main target was more likely to be Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Enrichment creates fuel for nuclear power plants or, if pursued to a much higher degree, can provide material for an atomic bomb.

Jalali said Stuxnet might still pose a risk. “We should know that fighting the Stuxnet virus does not mean the threat has been completely tackled, because viruses have a certain life span and they might continue their activities in another way.”

He urged the government to take action against the enemies he said were waging cyber war on Iran.

“Perhaps the Foreign Ministry had overlooked the options to legally pursue the case, and it seems our diplomatic apparatus should pay more attention to follow up the cyber wars staged against Iran,” Jalali said.

(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb; Writing by Ramin Mostafavi; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Mark Trevelyan)

‘Bahrain says Hezbollah seeking to overthrow regime’.

  Bahrain accused the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah of trying to topple the Gulf country’s ruling Sunni family, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

In a confidential report sent to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Bahrain also said that Hezbollah’s leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, worked directly with Bahrain’s majority Shi’ite opposition on tactics to challenge the regime. Both Hezbollah and the Bahraini opposition have denied cooperation in efforts to overthrow the ruling Khalifa family.

According to the Wall Street Journal, US intelligence officials claimed to have tracked communications between Hezbollah, Iran, and the Bahraini opposition groups since protests erupted in February. The issue highlights growing tensions between the Sunni-Arab Gulf countries and the non-Arab Shi’ite Iran who see the Iranian influence in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and increasingly in Egypt as a threat.

In March Bahrain had lodged a formal complaint to the Lebanese government over a  Hezbollah offer of support to the protesters. Hezbollah had denied it had any cadres or Lebanese individuals operating in the gulf country, and Hezbollah does not have any cells in Bahrain, either composed of Bahrainis or any other nationalities”.

Nasrallah admitted to giving political and moral support to protesters, but said “that our Bahraini brothers did not ask us for any military or security training on any day and we have not given any training of that kind.”

Protests in Bahrain were quelled when Saudi Arabia along with other Gulf states sent troops to the island country in order to support the ruling regime.

U.S. plans sanctions on Syria in wake of brutal crackdowns – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

(I’m sure this makes the brutal butcher Assad quake in his boots… – JW)

The Obama administration is drafting an executive order to freeze the assets of senior Syrian officials and bar them from engaging in any business dealings with the United States, says a Wall Street Journal report.

By Haaretz Service

The Obama administration may level sanctions against Syria as punishment for President Bashar Assad’s government’s violent crackdown on protesters, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

The U.S. is currently drafting an executive order that will empower President Obama to freeze the assets of senior Syrian officials and bar them from engaging in any business dealings with the United States, the report said, citing officials briefed on the matter.

	Protestors gather during a demonstration in the Syrian port city of Banias April 22, 2011.
	Photo by: Reuters

According to the report, freezing Syrian officials’ assets in the U.S. will have little impact on Assad’s inner circle. However, the hope is that European countries, where Syrian officials have more substantial holdings, will follow suit, thereby having a more crippling economic effect.

Officials reportedly hope that the legal order will be completed by the U.S. Treasury Department in the coming weeks, an indication of a hardening of the United State’s stance toward Syria.

This is a marked divergence from the Obama administration’s initial policy of rapprochement, with the United States sending an ambassador to the Syrian capital of Damascus for the first time in five years this past January.

The U.S. froze ties with the Middle Eastern country in the wake of the assassination of Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, which many suspect was Syria’s doing.

Relations with the U.S. deteriorated increasingly with the escalation of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah along the Lebanese border in 2006. The U.S. publically criticized Syria’s political and logistical support of the militant organization.

Earlier this month, WikiLeaks documents published by the Washington Post revealed that the State Department has been secretly financing opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The leaked documents show that the U.S. has provided at least $6 million to Barada TV, a London-based satellite channel that broadcasts anti-government news into Syria, and other opposition groups inside Syria since 2006, the newspaper said.

The Post said it was not clear from the WikiLeaks documents whether the U.S. was still financing Assad’s opponents, though they showed funding had been set aside through September 2010.

The State Department refused to comment on the authenticity of the cables, the Post said.

Syrian activists have been staging protests against Assad’s authoritarian regime for more than a month. Hundreds of people have been killed in clashed between security forces and protesters.

President Assad lifted the decades-long emergency laws last week, one of the protesters’ key demands, and has attempted to appease dissidents with promises of reforms and a government reshuffle, however protests and crackdowns persist.

Syrian authorities arrested dozens of anti-government activists Sunday, and killed over 100 protesters on Friday in the bloodiest crackdown since uprisings began last month.

Tanks deploy in Deraa; bodies seen lying in the streets.

  Eight tanks and two armored vehicles deployed in the old quarter of the besieged Syrian city of Deraa and several bodies were seen lying in a main street near the Omari mosque, a witness said on Monday.

The witness in Deraa said snipers on government buildings and security forces in army fatigues had been shooting at random at houses since tanks moved in just after dawn prayers.

“People are taking cover in homes. I could see two bodies near the mosque and no one was able to go out and drag them away,” the witness said.

Syrian security forces have shot dead at least 13 civilians since they swept into the coastal town of Jabla on Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday.

The security forces and gunmen loyal to President Bashar Assad deployed in the old Sunni quarter of Jabla on Sunday after a pro-democracy protest in the town the previous night, rights campaigners in contact with Jabla said.

Overnight, Syrian troops in armored vehicles poured into the restive town of Deraa  and opened fire, residents said on Monday, the latest bloodshed in crackdown on protests that has escalated sharply in recent days.

Syrian writers issued a declaration denouncing the crackdown, a sign of outrage surging through the intellectual elite over the violence.

Rights groups say security forces have killed more than 350 civilians since unrest began last month. A third of the victims were killed in the past three days as the scale and breadth of a popular revolt against President Bashar Assad grew.

Residents in Deraa, where the protest movement against Asaad first erupted last month, said hundreds of troops had arrived.

“They were firing. Witnesses have told me that there have been five deaths so far and houses have become hospitals,” a Deraa resident named Mohsen told Al Jazeera by telephone.

Foreign journalists have mostly been expelled from the country, making it impossible to verify the situation on the ground. Grisly footage posted on the Internet by demonstrators in recent days appears to show troops firing on unarmed crowds.

In some of the latest violence, activists said government troops and gunmen loyal to Assad shot dead at least nine civilians on Sunday in the Mediterranean coastal town of Jabla, where troops deployed following a protest the previous night.

Rights campaigners said they feared Assad’s forces were preparing for an attack on the town of Nawa after reports of bulldozers and military vehicles heading there. Thousands of people in the town called for the overthrow of Assad on Sunday at a funeral for protesters killed by security forces.

Electricity and communications were cut off in parts of Nawa by the evening and residents, some armed, erected barriers in the streets in preparation to defend against attack.

“Long live Syria. Down with Bashar!” mourners chanted during the funeral in Nawa, 25 km (15 miles) north of Deraa.

“Leave, leave! The people want the overthrow of the regime.”

In Banias, south of Jabla, protest leaders said they would cut the main coastal highway unless the siege on Jabla was lifted. Jabla is home to large numbers of members of Assad’s Alawite Shi’ite minority who had generally stayed away from protests in the past.

Breaking the barrier of fear

Monday’s declaration was signed by 102 writers and journalists, in Syria and in exile, representing all the country’s main sects, a sign that shock at the violence is crossing Syria’s lines of sectarian division.

It called on Syrian intellectuals “who have not broken the barrier of fear to make a clear stand.

“We condemn the violent, oppressive practices of the Syrian regime against the protesters and mourn the martyrs of the uprising.”

Signatories included Alawite figures such as former political prisoner Loay Hussein; female writers Samar Yazbek and Hala Mohammad; Souad Jarrous, correspondent for al-Sharq al-Awsat pan-Arab daily; writer and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh and filmmaker Mohammad Ali al-Attassi.

Mansour al-Ali, a prominent Alawite figure from the city of Homs, was arrested in his home city after he spoke out against the shooting of protesters, an activist in Homs said.

At least 100 people were killed across Syria on Friday, the highest toll of the unrest, when security forces shot protesters demanding political freedoms and an end to corruption in their country, ruled for 41 years by the Assad dynasty.

Another 12 people were killed on Saturday at mass funerals for slain protesters. Rights campaigners said secret police raided homes near Damascus and in the central city of Homs on Sunday, arresting activists.

Israpundit » Blog Archive » Syria: Who Is the Opposition and When Is The Moment of Truth?.

The villains from Damascus – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: Assads poisoned Mideast’s atmosphere, engaged in multi-front war on Israel

Mordechai Nisan

Even in our world colored with grays and not only blacks and whites, the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus would be a great blessing for the Middle East and the world. Nonetheless, for some Israelis this would be a hard blow to suffer, because it might signify that Israel will be stuck with the Golan Heights for the long future.

The list of Syria’s misdemeanors and crimes is legion. From belligerent Soviet ally to godfather and patron of Palestinian terrorism, Hafez the father and Bashar the son crafted a policy strategy that demonized Israel, betrayed the Arab world, consolidated the regional hegemony of Iran, and perpetuated an Alawite sectarian regime in defiance of the Sunni Muslim majority in the country. Acting against their countrymen, the Assads persecuted the Kurds, intimidated the Druze, and despoiled the tiny Jewish community.

The quest for power whetted the ambition of the mountain family from Qardaha. They reached for rule in the 1960s, grabbed it in 1970, and held it with a vengeance employing a brutal dictatorship, a regime of fear, while waving tattered Arabist anti-Israeli slogans.

The invasion of Lebanon in 1976 that culminated in a ruthless and bloodthirsty occupation only seemingly ended in 2005; throughout it was a scandalous violation of Lebanese human rights, national identity, and political independence. A series of Syrian assassinations of key Christian Lebanese personalities did not exclude, we shall never doubt, the former Sunni Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Syrian interventionism also played a destructive role in Iraq to foil America’s goal of fashioning stability in the post-Saddam era on the fractured Baghdadian political landscape.

Israeli woes

Israeli sorrows and sufferings from the Assads’ Syria were far more insidious in comparison to any inflicted upon the Jewish state by any other country. Perhaps this litany of havoc began with the October 1973 Yom Kippur War that continued until May 1974 on the Golan front.

Syria’s torturing of Israeli POWs should never be forgotten. The smashing of Lebanon in the 1970s, as in the Hundred Days War in Beirut in 1978, and supporting Palestinian warfare against the Lebanese, including the barbaric massacre of Christian communities, was designed to deny Israel a free Lebanon that would be a friendly neighbor.

Syria allying with Hezbollah from the 1980s and facilitating its armaments pipeline and fighting doctrine bled Israel, demoralized the Jews, and contributed to the reprehensible and reckless IDF withdrawal in May, 2000. When Syria forged intimate ties with Iran, soon after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, it became clear that Khomeini’s jihad was now comfortably pre-positioned on Israel’s northern border regions.

Syria worked assiduously to strategically isolate Israel in the Middle East in putting together a politically unorthodox alliance system. Israel’s former regional partner, Sunni non-Arab Turkey, was enticed by its own ambitions to adopt an adversarial anti-Israel position.

The Syrian-Turkey connection warmed up, and their joint pro-Palestinian stance emitted a virulent rancor. The Damascene headquarters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad radiated Assad’s centralizing leadership role in the war against Israel. This was no less apparent with Syria’s emerging nuclear program, which Israel confronted in bombing its facility in 2007.

All the while official and non-official Israeli movers and shakers, loyal to their paradigm and disloyal to their people, fantasized that Bashar Assad was really interested in peace with Israel, and but for Jerusalem’s obstinacy a deal would be concluded.

This interpretation was divorced from the glaring strategic data and Syrian political connections that had ripened over the years. The fact that the Golan Heights was a tranquil front since 1974 did not prove the Assads’ inclination toward peace with Israel, but rather indicated that the multi-front war Syria was directing against Israel could be superbly effective as an indirect strategy conducted with impunity.

Future Hopes

When and if the Assad regime falls, the collapse of Iranian hegemony across the region may not be far behind. The Arab Sunni world will rejoice that wayward Syria has been separated from the Tehran Shiite-dominated axis. Losing its strategic hinterland and ideological benefactor, Hezbollah too will suffer a blow which will catalyze re-arranging power relations in the forlorn land of the cedars.

Freedom in Damascus will contribute to the recovery of freedom in Beirut. I believe, in rejecting the fossilized Israeli establishment view, that the end of Syrian domination of Lebanon is absolutely the moral and reasonable political interest for Israel.

A regime change in Damascus opens up the possibility of various domestic options: a Sunni fundamentalist state, a liberal polity, maybe a federated entity based on the geo-ethnic pluralism of the country. Despite turbulence in Syrian streets and politics, Israel’s military might assures her safety as she possesses both deterrent and offensive capabilities that will challenge Syria in the days ahead, regardless of the outcome of the revolutionary changes that now and will confront her.

We can now well appreciate the wisdom in the traditional Israeli stance since 1967 of settlement, development, and territorial retention of the Golan Heights. This obvious strategic resource adorned with manifest values of topography and water, a terrain decked with Jewish history and demographic tranquility, would be abandoned only in a fit of mental infirmity.

And with the Assads gone, the Middle East as a whole will be able to move to transcend the state of terror and tension with which the Syrian regime poisoned the political atmosphere for over four long decades.

Dr. Mordechai Nisan is a retired teacher of Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report April 24, 2011, 7:46 PM (GMT+02:00)

Syria plunged in bloodbath

Bashar Assad’s tanks and infantry made their first assaults Sunday, April 24 on Jableh on the Mediterranean and Daraa in the south, after a 48-hour bloodbath by his security forces claiming up to 350 lives failed break the five-week countrywide uprising against his rule. Video-clips show tanks converging on the two towns with soldiers running in their wake while heavy gunfire continued to resound in Hama, al-Nuaimeh near Daraa and Saraqeb, southwest of Aleppo.

The Syrian ruler continues to ignore all the evidence that by massacring civilian protesters he has only magnified their numbers and Sunday decided to press ahead with his last resort for piling on the violence by deploying trained infantry men and tanks in a final attempt to smash the five-week uprising, debkafile‘s military sources report.

The southern epicenter of the uprising Daraa has resisted the most ruthless attempts to suppress its protest rallies. Less has been heard about Jabal, a town of 80,000 situated between Banias and Latakia. Anti-Assad demonstrators have barricaded themselves inside the Abu Bakr Siddiq Mosque, one of Syria’s main Sufi centers.
debkafile reported earlier Sunday:

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.