WarSclerotic

Big commecial center of Aleppo marches against Assad

Damascus was alive with rumors Thursday, April 14 that President Bashar Assad and his family were preparing to flee to Saudi Arabia. They were, sparked by the discovery that several high-ranking Syrian officials and army officers were evacuating their families from the capital to Persian Gulf emirates.

US intelligence officials also disclosed that Iran was secretly helping Assad crack down on his own people, providing gear to suppress crowds and assistance in blocking and monitoring protesters’ Internet and cell phones.

Those officials did not refer to the Iran-backed Hizballah’s active aid in the government crackdown. However, as the anti-government demonstrations pervade dozens of Syrian towns, even the second largest Aleppo, Assad is relying for survival less on the army and police and increasingly on the 10,000-strong armed Shabbiha gangs drawn from the Assad tribe of the minority Alawite community and trained in urban combat by Hizballah and Iran. In normal times, the Shabbiha are regularly employed by the Iran-Hizballah arms and drug smuggling rings.
debkafile‘s sources report increasing signs of desperation at the center of the Assad regime. One was a new allegation claiming that the Saad Hariri, who was ousted as Lebanese prime minister by Hizballah, was deploying armed gangs in Syrian cities to increase the bloodshed by shooting at anti-Assad protesters and security forces alike. Hariri makes an improbable scapegoat; he has neither the ability nor manpower to operate on any scale in Syria.

But the Syrian ruler is clearly at his wits’ end for means to stem the onrushing threat to his regime after live ammunition failed to deter the protesters and halt the spread of their uprising.
Wednesday night, the government banned demonstrations of any kind in the country, but no one expects the decree to be obeyed. For now, Syrian authorities and opposition are bracing for Friday, April 15, when they stage their next major test of strength on the streets of dozens of cities. Bashar Assad’s grip on power is clearly loosening under the constant battering of protest.
Wednesday, April 13, debkafile reported: The popular uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad is still spreading.  Tuesday, April 12, one of the Assad family’s own Alawite tribes and the key Sunni city of Aleppo joined the movement demanding the president and his kin’s removal. Assad fought back against the expanding threat to his survival by mobilizing all his military and security resources, including the loyal young thugs of the shabbiha gangs. They have orders to shoot to kill and not permit ambulances to collect the wounded. Tanks seal the most restive towns of Teraa, Bania,s Latakia and Hama.

Alawite unrest centers on the impoverished Knaan tribe centered in the village of Bhamra in the mountains of northern Syria. A second immediate danger to the regime comes from Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub, where for the first time more than 10,000 protesters marched. The Druze mountain inhabitants are up in arms. So too are the Kurdish towns of the north such as Kamishli and the Shammar tribes of southeastern Syria around the border town of Abu Kamal.

Damascus University has been under siege for four days, although security forces have not been able to breach it.

A grave humanitarian crisis is spreading with the unrest. Army outposts and roadblocks have cut off main roads linking the north to southern and central Syria, as well as telephone and internet services and even food deliveries in many places. Mass arrests of thousands take place nightly including, according to debkafile‘s sources, members of the Syrian ruling establishment for the crime of appealing to Assad to abandon his violent methods of repression and meet some of the protesters demands for reforms. Some are journalists who support the regime but who wrote articles to this effect. They were not published.

For the first time, debkafile‘s sources report that the protesters began returning the fire against security forces on Monday, April 11, in a number of places, especially Deraa in the south and Banias in the north. A well-laid ambush was laid on the main coastal road linking Latakia and Banias and nine Syrian officers and troops killed.

debkafile‘s Middle East and intelligence sources report a three-way shooting war currently in progress in Syria, in which the army and security forces, the protesters, and the shabbiha gangs are taking part. The and bloody mayhem is such that the number of casualties is almost impossible to assess.

The troops open fire at protesters as soon as a few people gather in the street without waiting for a demonstration to form. The wounded are denied medical care and allowed to die in the streets as a deterrent to protesters. Tuesday night, the White House finally issued a harsh denunciation of the Syrian “government.”

The statement read: “We are deeply concerned by reports that Syrians who have been wounded by their government are being denied access to medical care. The escalating repression by the Syrian government is outrageous, and the United States strongly condemns the continued efforts to suppress peaceful protesters. President Assad and the Syrian government must respect the universal rights of the Syrian people, who are rightly demanding the basic freedoms that they have been denied.”

debkafile‘s sources in Washington say that the language used in this statement from the Obama administration continues to skirt the protesters’ most pressing demand for the Syrian president to step down, because of the still unresolved internal debate on how to handle Assad.

Despite the mounting brutality of the Syrian ruler’s methods to crush the revolt against his regime, some White House circles in Washington are warning that Assad’s fall would open the door for radical Muslim elements to take over, even suggesting that this would put Israel in “mortal danger.”
This argument was never heard in Washington when Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Egypt. And it by no means relates to the Assad regime’s eight-year long record as primary accomplice and abettor of radical Muslim organizations such as Al Qaeda, the Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian Hamas. Starting from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Damascus gave sanctuary and launching-pads for Muslim groups to strike American forces fighting in Iraq, including training camps and logistical aid for smuggling weapons and explosives for that purpose. Syria also facilitates the passage of arms and other support to the Hizballah radicals.

The extreme measures to which Assad has resorted as the revolt against him enters its fourth week have led to firefights within the army. Many cases are now reported of Syrian officers opening fire on other Syrian officers, killing them when they refuse to shoot protesters. There have been incidents of Shabbiha gangs shooting two ways – on demonstrators and at times on army forces. In one such incident in Ras al-Naba’a, a quarter of Banias – the irregulars appeared to be goading the soldiers into using more force to disperse the protesters. In others, these pro-Assad street gangs appear to be shooting from demonstrations to make it look as though the protesters were killing the soldiers.

Contrary to the image the Assads have always presented that “the Alawites are the ruling class in Syria,” it is worth pointing out that they in fact rule Damascus, while the rest of those minority tribes, which number 1.4 million (8 percent of the 26 million population) live in abject poverty with no electricity or running water in their villages and no ties to the Assads. The paradox is that though lacking influence in the capital, their revolt against the regime could be the last straw for Asad.

These villages are now rising up for fear of being stigmatized, however unjustly, by the Sunni majority of collaboration with the Assads and targeted for revenge. In any case, they are so penurious and neglected that they have little to lose by the regime’s fall.
The Shabbiha: This well-armed, roughly organized group derives most of its 9-11,000 members from Assad clans within the Alawite community and its allies. Their fighting skills were imparted by the Lebanese Hizballah or Iranian Revolutionary Guards instructors, but their loyalty to the Assad family is undivided. As smugglers, their strongholds are mostly along the coastal region, some of whose communities rely on the Shabbiha for their livelihood.

Clashes in southern Syrian city of Daraa.

The popular uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad is still spreading.  Tuesday, April 12, one of the Assad family’s own Alawite tribes and the key Sunni city of Aleppo joined the movement demanding the president and his kin’s removal. Assad fought back against the expanding threat to his survival by mobilizing all his military and security resources, including the loyal young thugs of the shabbiha gangs. They have orders to shoot to kill and not permit ambulances to collect the wounded. Tanks seal the most restive towns of Teraa, Bania,s Latakia and Hama.

Alawite unrest centers on the impoverished Knaan tribe centered in the village of Bhamra in the mountains of northern Syria. A second immediate danger to the regime comes from Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub, where for the first time more than 10,000 protesters marched. The Druze mountain inhabitants are up in arms. So too are the Kurdish towns of the north such as Kamishli and the Shammar tribes of southeastern Syria around the border town of Abu Kamal.

Damascus University has been under siege for four days, although security forces have not been able to breach it.

A grave humanitarian crisis is spreading with the unrest. Army outposts and roadblocks have cut off main roads linking the north to southern and central Syria, as well as telephone and internet services and even food deliveries in many places. Mass arrests of thousands take place nightly including, according to debkafile‘s sources, members of the Syrian ruling establishment for the crime of appealing to Assad to abandon his violent methods of repression and meet some of the protesters demands for reforms. Some are journalists who support the regime but who wrote articles to this effect. They were not published.

For the first time, debkafile‘s sources report that the protesters began returning the fire against security forces on Monday, April 11, in a number of places, especially Deraa in the south and Banias in the north. A well-laid ambush was laid on the main coastal road linking Latakia and Banias and nine Syrian officers and troops killed.

debkafile‘s Middle East and intelligence sources report a three-way shooting war currently in progress in Syria, in which the army and security forces, the protesters, and the shabbiha gangs are taking part. The and bloody mayhem is such that the number of casualties is almost impossible to assess.

The troops open fire at protesters as soon as a few people gather in the street without waiting for a demonstration to form. The wounded are denied medical care and allowed to die in the streets as a deterrent to protesters. Tuesday night, the White House finally issued a harsh denunciation of the Syrian “government.”

The statement read: “We are deeply concerned by reports that Syrians who have been wounded by their government are being denied access to medical care. The escalating repression by the Syrian government is outrageous, and the United States strongly condemns the continued efforts to suppress peaceful protesters. President Assad and the Syrian government must respect the universal rights of the Syrian people, who are rightly demanding the basic freedoms that they have been denied.”

debkafile‘s sources in Washington say that the language used in this statement from the Obama administration continues to skirt the protesters’ most pressing demand for the Syrian president to step down, because of the still unresolved internal debate on how to handle Assad.

Despite the mounting brutality of the Syrian ruler’s methods to crush the revolt against his regime, some White House circles in Washington are warning that Assad’s fall would open the door for radical Muslim elements to take over, even suggesting that this would put Israel in “mortal danger.”
This argument was never heard in Washington when Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Egypt. And it by no means relates to the Assad regime’s eight-year long record as primary accomplice and abettor of radical Muslim organizations such as Al Qaeda, the Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian Hamas. Starting from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Damascus gave sanctuary and launching-pads for Muslim groups to strike American forces fighting in Iraq, including training camps and logistical aid for smuggling weapons and explosives for that purpose. Syria also facilitates the passage of arms and other support to the Hizballah radicals.

The extreme measures to which Assad has resorted as the revolt against him enters its fourth week have led to firefights within the army. Many cases are now reported of Syrian officers opening fire on other Syrian officers, killing them when they refuse to shoot protesters. There have been incidents of Shabbiha gangs shooting two ways – on demonstrators and at times on army forces. In one such incident in Ras al-Naba’a, a quarter of Banias – the irregulars appeared to be goading the soldiers into using more force to disperse the protesters. In others, these pro-Assad street gangs appear to be shooting from demonstrations to make it look as though the protesters were killing the soldiers.

Contrary to the image the Assads have always presented that “the Alawites are the ruling class in Syria,” it is worth pointing out that they in fact rule Damascus, while the rest of those minority tribes, which number 1.4 million (8 percent of the 26 million population) live in abject poverty with no electricity or running water in their villages and no ties to the Assads. The paradox is that though lacking influence in the capital, their revolt against the regime could be the last straw for Asad.

These villages are now rising up for fear of being stigmatized, however unjustly, by the Sunni majority of collaboration with the Assads and targeted for revenge. In any case, they are so penurious and neglected that they have little to lose by the regime’s fall.
The Shabbiha: This well-armed, roughly organized group derives most of its 9-11,000 members from Assad clans within the Alawite community and its allies. Their fighting skills were imparted by the Lebanese Hizballah or Iranian Revolutionary Guards instructors, but their loyalty to the Assad family is undivided. As smugglers, their strongholds are mostly along the coastal region, some of whose communities rely on the Shabbiha for their livelihood.

Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant – a ticking bomb?

Saudi and Kuwait officials have warned the US that if Iran activates its first nuclear reactor at Bushehr in May as planned, there is a good chance it will blow up and the entire Gulf region suffer a nuclear disaster on  the scale of the misfortune at Japan’s Fukushima and expose millions to radiation contamination.

This issue was urgently raised in recent Saudi-US talks – first on April 4 with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and again Monday, April 11, with the National Security Adviser to the US President Tom Donilon.

The two high-level US official visits to Riyadh in six days attest to the fierce discord between Saudi King Abdullah and the administration – not just over Iran and its nuclear activity but the entire gamut of US Middle East policy.
When he met the defense secretary, the king took Gates charged that the White House ignored Saudi intelligence evidence passed to the CIA that Tehran and Hizballah were actively fomenting the unrest in Bahrain with a view to igniting parallel disturbances in the eastern Saudi oil regions among the two million Shiites living there. Abdullah complained bluntly that no matter what evidence is put before President Obama, he refuses to budge from his course of engagement with regard to Iran.
The king declared angrily that the lax American attitude toward Islamic Republic’s nuclear aspirations places the very existence of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf nations in peril.
Washington had twisted Saudi arms to refrain from challenging the Bushehr nuclear plant when preparations for its activation were completed last year, despite its harmful potential for the region. (debkafile reported last August that similar pressure was applied to Israel.) Even the Iranians, Abdullah told Gates, were scared to switch it on out of concern for their own people.
It was the first time the Saudi monarch linked the Iranian plant with the Japanese nuclear calamity. Tuesday, April 12, Japan raised its severity to maximum seven the same as Chernobyl.

Four months ago, on Jan. 26, Moscow acted outside the rules of conventional diplomacy when Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin publicly demanded a NATO investigation into the effects of the Stuxnet malworm on the Bushehr reactor. He repeated a previous warning to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “The virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear reactor in Iran could trigger a nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.”

debkafile‘s intelligence and Russians sources report that Russian concerns focused on the discovery of the unexplained entry of small pieces of metal into the cooling system. This told them that the Iranians had not managed to stop Stuxnet or its impact on the reactor’s control systems and there was no guarantee that more malfunctions capable of causing the plant to blow up had been were not in store.

These warnings were initially heeded: Russian-Iranian preparations to active the reactor were suspended and it was emptied of nuclear fuel.
But then Friday, April 8, the fuel was reloaded the fuel. The next day, the head of Iran’s Nuclear Energy Commission Fereydoun Abbasi said: “Even before the earthquake and nuclear contamination crisis in Japan, Iran had accepted Russian experts’ proposal to revise its plant to load fuel into the core of the Bushehr power plant’s reactor.”

Iran had never before referred to the Fukushima in relation to Bushehr.

Our sources add that the Abbasi statement clearly held Moscow responsible for any potential nuclear disaster that may beset the Iranian facility. It also confirmed the Saudi claim. Riyadh has accordingly demanded that Washington act without delay and by all means possible to prevent Bushehr going on line next month according to plan.
Such US action would be diametrically opposed to the Obama administration’s Iran policy at present. However, failure to meet the Saudi demand will deepen the acute crisis in Saudi-US relations and mistrust sparked by the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak – with effect on other related issues such as Yemen and even Pakistan.

Iron Dome makes its operational debut

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were expected at long last to instruct new chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to take effective military action to put a stop to the missile misery inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians month after month, year after year – or so the victimized communities believed.

After all, almost a million civilians in seven Israeli towns were at the receiving end of 120 missile and mortar shells between Friday and Saturday, April 8-9.

But Sunday, April 10, they learned that their government had succumbed to a “ceasefire” deal that would perpetuate the harassment: Hamas and the Jihad Islami agreed to desist from attacking Ashdod, Beersheba, Ofakim and Netivot, Palmachim and Kiryat Gat, the towns at the outer edge of their range, but permitted to keep up their regular mortar and missile fusillade against the communities abutting on the Gaza Strip

The IDF agreed to suspend its counter-actions by land, air and sea. Although 17 Hamas commanders had been killed in those 48 hours, Israeli strikes had left intact the Islamists’ capabilities for expanding their attacks as far as Israel’s heartland around Tel Aviv any time they saw fit – as they have done so many times in the past.

The communities not covered by the deal would have to keep on dodging between bomb shelters instead of living normal lives.

Sunday, as the cabinet deliberated its next steps, the Palestinians fired five mortar rounds and 3 Qassam missiles at their usual targets, the small communities of Sderot, Shear Hanegev and the Eshkol farm district. By the end of the day, 20 projectiles had been fired from Gaza.

A missile was also aimed at the town of Ashkelon to test the limits acceptable to Israel. It was intercepted by the new Iron Dome anti-missile system and Israeli withheld military response. Hamas and Jihad Islami were allowed to infer that southern Ashkelon was fair game.

Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu staged a photo op with one of the two Iron Dome systems, saying the IDF was under orders to restore calm and security to southwestern Israel. His words fell on skeptical ears. By then, his audience in southwestern Israel knew their case was lost after hearing Ehud Barak’s cynical comment in a radio interview that morning that anyone looking for a quiet life “should go to Finland or Switzerland.”
This was the sort of remark Israelis are used to hearing from Palestinian extremists and Iranian leaders in their references to “the Zionists.”

Abandoned to their fate, the missile-battered communities did not miss the contrasting hoots of jubilation coming from the Gaza Strip close by. Palestinian radical leaders were celebrating their victory over Israel: Having won a license to keep up their attacks within certain limits, they were sure they could manipulate Israel into giving up its control of the 500-meter deep buffer sector of Gaza which the IDF had placed off-limits to armed terrorists. They will no doubt put that to the test as well as soon as the “ceasefire” gets underway.
For now, three facts stand out:

One: The IDF is standing by its “ceasefire” commitment.
Two:  Hamas has stopped shooting the heavy Grad at the Israeli towns targeted a day ago. It is keeping up its steady trickle of mortar and missile fire on the Gaza border communities.

Three: Israeli policy-makers are glorifying the Iron Dome as a wonder weapon – which after years of further development it may turn out to be – to get them off the hook of offensive action against Hamas.

In the last three days, the system intercepted less than 10 out of the scores of incoming missiles. It is not designed to catch smaller projectiles, including mortar shells. Two anti-missile weapons have been experimentally deployed in Ashkelon and Beersheba; none at the border communities which take the daily brunt of Hamas attacks, partly because they are expensive, $50 million a piece.
Yet Defense Minister Barak told those communities who are faced with keeping their children behind doors throughout the Passover holiday: “Now you are protected.”

Netanyahu slightly more subtly celebrated the Iron Dome as a “defensive triumph and an offensive gain against Hamas attacks.
The chief of staff added his two bits to the show by remarking that the IDF would continue to act with “resolve, good judgment and the necessary assertiveness as necessary.” He was even heard to declare that “the situation in the South was calmer now than before.” (sic)
The strategic edge over Hamas aggression offered by the Iron Dome and its potential defensive value was thrown away by the government’s submission to Hamas “ceasefire” terms, which also gave the Palestinian group a chance to assess the impact of the new weapon and weigh counter-measures. Hoping to outwit the homemade Israeli anti-missile weapon, Hamas fired missiles in volleys, only to discover for the first time that Iron Drone was designed to catch multiple firings not just singles.

The Palestinian radicals understood this to mean that Netanyahu government had given up plans to disarm them and was content with improving defensive capabilities to protect civilians.

If view of this equation, Israel now faces the following prospects – if the partial ceasefire holds:

1. In the short term, missile and mortar attacks will continue at a reduced level. But armed terrorists will continue their attempts to breach the Gaza border for attacks inside Israel. The “ceasefire” terms do not restrict this kind of Palestinian terror.

2. Gaza’s Hamas rulers will try and gain on the points they have won to force Israel to part with more concessions. They can be expected to use their friends and allies in Europe, the United Nations and the Arab world to make Israel lift its land, sea and air blockade over Gaza and so permit weapons shipments and other strategic assets untrammeled access to the enclave. The Egyptian military junta will no doubt end its blockade and open Rafah to free movement between the Gaza Strip and Sinai.
3.  Hamas will press on with its terrorist campaign, which started with the massacre of five Vogel family members in Itamar on the West Bank on March 11 and continued with the Jerusalem bus terminal bombing on the 23rd.  The Islamists are known to be planning more murderous operations and abductions over the Passover festival which starts on April 18.
4. Tehran, Damascus and Beirut must have taken note of the way Israel buckled under the Hamas missile offensive – and so to will Cairo.  They will all pat the Hamas military leader Ahmad Jabary on the back for persuading the organization’s political leaders in Damascus that, however much they escalated their attacks,  the Netanyahu government would hold back from an effective ground operation for destroying its military infrastructure and weapons stocks.

Palestinian propagandists have managed to turn the relative roles of aggressor and victim upside down and are presenting Hamas as the injured party – or at the very least Israel as equally at fault for the violence.

The anti-Israel Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa quickly picked up this line. Sunday, he called on the UN Security Council to enforce a no-fly zone over the Gaza Strip, a ludicrous bid to equate Israel’s defensive operations against a terrorist organization which has declared war on the Jewish state with Muammar Qaddafi’s armed might against a domestic rebellion.