WarSclerotic

Report: Assad forces kill 24 civilians in violent protests across Syria – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters flood cities throughout Syria in day activists call largest outpour against Assad regime; No sign of security forces in Hama; Officials say 10,497 refugees still in Turkey.

By News Agencies

Syrian forces killed at least 24 civilians on Friday during pro-democracy protests across Syria and in military assaults on villages in a region bordering Turkey, prominent human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouna said.

Zaitouna told Reuters by phone that the 24 included seven people in the central city of Homs, scene of widening protests against President Bashar Assad and 14 villagers in the northwestern province of Idlib, where troops backed by tanks and helicopters have been storming villages to subdue dissent in rural areas near Turkey.

	Syrians carry national flags during a candle vigil in honor of those who were killed in recent violence, in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, June 29, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

Activists described Friday’s protests as the largest outpouring against the Assad regime and a powerful message of the opposition’s resolve, as hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded cities around Syria.

The wildfire rage — flaring in dozens of places at the same time — further strained the resources of Assad’s security forces and military as they also try to choke off a refugee wave into Turkey.

The centerpiece of the latest protests — the central city of Hama — brings further complications for the government. Security forces moved outside Hama in early June after shootings that left 65 people dead, and now the streets appear fully under the sway of the opposition with an estimated 300,000 people gathering Friday in the central square, activists said.

Crowd estimates and other details cannot be independently verified. The Syrian government has banned most foreign media from the country and restricted coverage.

But the protest surge Friday appeared to dwarf recent weeks as Assad’s forces tried to wear down the opposition with relentless force. Syrian rights groups say more than 1,400 people have been killed, most of them unarmed protesters, since mid-March.

The regime disputes the toll, blaming “armed thugs” and foreign conspirators for the unrest that has posed the most serious challenge to the Assad family’s 40-year ruling dynasty in Syria.

In Hama, anti-government crowds defiantly staked their claim to the city — which carries important symbolism to the opposition. In 1982, Assad’s late father, Hafez Assad, stormed the city to crush an uprising, leaving between 10,000 and 25,000 people dead, rights groups say.

Syria-based activist Mustafa Osso estimated 300,000 people joined the rally in Hama without any sign of security forces, which remained outside the city and appeared unwilling to risk major bloodshed again.

It also could reflect fatigue in Assad’s core troops and the need to concentrate on what officials consider strategic fronts. Assad’s elite forces have waged nearly nonstop crackdowns around the country as new protest hotbeds emerged.

Now, they are mobilized in difficult terrain along the Turkish border in efforts to clamp down on refugees fleeing across the border. The regime is deeply embarrassed by the exodus and also fears the camps could become opposition enclaves out of the government’s reach.

“Syrian security forces are exhausted,” said Osso. “There are demonstrations all over Syria and they cannot cover these areas.”

In Lithuania, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on Assad’s regime to either begin a credible political reform process or “continue to see increasingly organized resistance.”

“It doesn’t appear that there’s a coherent and consistent message coming from Syria,” Clinton told a news conference. “We know what they have to do. They must begin a genuine transition to democracy and allowing one meeting of the opposition in Damascus is not sufficient action toward achieving that goal.”

Osso said huge protest crowds moved into the streets after the Muslim noon prayers in places across the country, including the capital Damascus. Some carried red cards to copy the “send off” signal by soccer referees.

A video posted on the Local Coordination Committees’ Facebook page showed dozens of people marching outside a mosque in Damascus’ central neighborhood of Midan as they chanted “Bashar out, Syria is free.”

Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, which track the protests in Syria, said Friday’s demonstrations were the largest since the uprising began in mid-March. He did not give a figure, but said there were gatherings in 172 different locations with numbers ranging from few hundreds to hundreds of thousands as in Hama.

Activists — including Idilbi and the Local Coordination Committees — said at least 11 people were killed by security forces around the country, including five in the central city of Homs and two in Damascus.

In separate clashes, three people were killed during a military operation seeking to halt the flow of refugees heading across the border to Turkey, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the London-based director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

More than 10,000 Syrians have already taken shelter in refugee camps in Turkey to escape the violence.

State-run Syrian TV aired footage of pro-government demonstrators in different parts of the country carrying Syrian flags and posters of Assad. State TV said gunmen opened fire at police officers, killing a police officers and a civilian.

Although Syria’s northern border with Turkey, Syrian forces have been combing through villages and hinterlands hunting down soldiers who abandoned their weapons and trying to quell demonstrations.

An activist said some villagers have fled as Syrian soldiers neared.

“They are ghost towns,” said the activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.

In the same area Friday, the activist said other villagers were marching toward the Roman-era city of Barah, where he said Syrian forces had encircled the town of some 20,000 people and positioned snipers on rooftops. Power and water supplies to the city were cut, the activist said.

Turkish officials said Friday 113 refugees have returned to Syria since Thursday and there were no new arrivals. They said the number of refugees still in Turkey is 10,497.

Tens of thousands take to the streets in fresh Syria protests – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Protesters chant ‘Basharm get out of our lives’; at least 14 civilians killed in last two days by President Assad’s forces as U.S. warns time running out for reforms.

By Reuters

Tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets nationwide on Friday shouting that President Bashar Assad should “leave”, extending a protest wave despite a military assault on restive northwestern towns, witnesses and activists said.

Demonstrations ranged from the suburbs of Damascus to the Lebanese border, the desert bordering Iraq and Idlib province, where tank assaults on hill villages near Turkey killed three civilians overnight, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Right. That raised the death toll to at least 14 villagers in the last two days, it said.

	Anti-government protest in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, Syria, earlier this month.
	Photo by: AP

“Bashar get out of our lives,” read placards carried by thousands of Kurds who marched in the northeastern city of Amouda, according to a YouTube video taken by a resident.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday that Syria is running out of time and will face increasingly organized opposition if it does not undertake reform.

Speaking at a news conference, she also said she was disheartened by reports of fresh violence in recent days and that the Syrian government’s decision to allow one opposition meeting in Damascus was not sufficient.

DEBKA.

The uprisings sweeping the Arab countries have set up a wave of uncertainty in such globally sensitive areas as the nuclear arms race and the oil industries. The volatility is rippling into unforeseen corners. The diplomats, the generals and the intelligence agencies are all constantly kept guessing about where the havoc will erupt next.
Here are three examples:
Is oil again behind the secret US and Italian talks with Qaddafi?
The Obama administration has not only embarked on secret talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai revealed on Saturday, June 18 and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confirmed the next day. Washington is also secretly engaged with representatives of Muammar Qaddafi.
Hence the bolt from the blue shot from Rome Wednesday June 22 when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had his foreign minister, Franco Frattini, suddenly demand a halt to NATO’s war actions in Libya for humanitarian aid to reach distressed Libyans, especially in the Misrata and Tripoli areas.
Realizing the US-Qaddafi talks had reached an advanced stage Prime Minister Berlusconi decided not to be left behind. Therefore, he resolved One – to get Italy out of the Libyan war, and Two – to give NATO fair notice to get used to operating without Italian air bases in its air campaign against Qaddafi.
If they don’t get the message, Rome will give the allies a deadline for the use of its bases and, implicitly, for ending the Libyan war.
By easing out of the conflict, Italy is helping along its own peace track with the Libyan ruler, opened as soon as Italian intelligence dropped the penny in Rome that the US and the Libyan ruler were talking.
Berlusconi is counting on his personal friendship with Qaddafi which goes back to 1998. Then he stood out as the only Western leader willing to apologize for a colonial regime and the misery it caused – in this case Italy’s occupation of Libya. Qaddafi still respects the Italian prime minister for that.
Berlusconi is determined not to let the Americans beat him to a deal with Qaddafi and leave Italy stumbling in the sands of Libya with Britain and France. He also hopes to beat American oil companies and win contracts for Italian oil and gas firms to rebuild Libyan oil fields.
The Italian prime minister is meanwhile not burning any bridges: If his talks with Muammar Qaddafi run aground, he will forget his threat to block Italian bases to NATO. If they go well, the coalition will have to find alternative bases for the British and French warplanes bombing Libya – not a simple matter. But Berlusconi hasn’t forgotten that when they went to war in Libya three months ago, Britain and France’s main objective was to gain control of Libyan oil.
Saudi Arabia is perfectly willing to cripple Iran’s oil-based economy
On Wednesday, June 8, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who recently took over from his ailing brother, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, as Saudi royal spokesman, told a private gathering of American and British servicemen at the RAF’s Molesworth airbase outside London that since the US and Western Europe were not prepared to enforce an oil embargo “with teeth” against Iran, Saudi Arabia would do so.
This, he said, would cripple Iran because half of its revenues derive from oil exports.
But the oil markets would not suffer; Saudi Arabia could easily make up any Iranian export shortfalls caused by sanctions or other measures for stopping its momentum for a nuclear bomb.
To put this in perspective, Saudi Arabia is known to have so much spare production capacity—nearly 4 million barrels per day—that it could replace all of Iran’s oil output on the instant.
The Saudi prince also left his audience in no doubt that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, so will Saudi Arabia. The Riyadh government, he said, is also prepared to apply military muscle to blocking the further expansion of Iranian influence in the Middle East or Muslim world.
Prince Turki’s listeners believed him when he assured them that in pursuit of those goals, Saudi Arabia would not think twice about attacking Iranian targets in the Persian Gulf and inside the country.
Note: DEBKA-Net-Weekly has reported on these Saudi policies at length since March. (See issues 488, 489 and 495).
The main burden of his remarks was that Saudi rulers are no longer standing about waiting for the United States or West Europe to end its involvement in support of the Arab Revolt and turn to Iran.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources add that Turki was also concerned to dispel the impression disseminated by the Obama administration that its involvement in the Arab unrest is somehow coordinated with Riyadh.
This is far from the case.
Our Washington sources report that the Obama administration took notice of Turki’s comments and is preparing measures for making up for any Iranian shortfalls and so pre-empt Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis may also strike Syria’s oil resources
Western intelligence agencies have been busily engaged since Monday, June 20, picking apart the 7,365 words Syrian President Bashar Assad poured out in his address to the Syrian nation from the University of Damascus.
They counted the number of times he said “conspiracy” or “conspirators”, “terrorists,” “fundamentalist extremists,” and “smuggled weapons.” After comparing the text with his last two speeches in the three months of unrest against his regime, they came to the conclusion that the Syrian ruler knows he is in deep trouble and is worried.
President Barack Obama‘s special assistant Dennis Ross told an audience of Israeli and Jewish (mostly American) leaders in Jerusalem this week that the Obama administration is planning to impose very tough sanctions on Syria – some even harsher than those targeting Iran.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Washington report the administration has concluded that Assad still has enough money to keep his military and security crackdown on protest running for another three months, i.e., up until the end of September.
At this point there is no sign that the Obama administration intends to clamp down an embargo on Syrian oil exports, which accounts for only a tiny percentage of the world oil market. By selling just 150,000 barrels a day, Damascus nets $7 million a day in revenue.
Although the numbers are quite small, Assad still desperately needs this income to keep his regime alive.
The Saudis tried to persuade the Americans that it was a simple matter for them to block Syrian oil exports and so exert real pressure on the Assad regime and curtail his brutal crackdown on dissent.
But they soon despaired of the Obama administration’s policy of restraint on Syria, just as they have given up on American sanctions on Iran.
But that may not be the end of the story: The Syrian oil fields are situated in the eastern Dir al-Azur region whose population is predominantly Shamar tribesmen who wander between Iraq, Syria and Jordan.
Some knowledgeable Middle East intelligence circles say it is only a question of time before the Syrian oil fields and installations are sabotaged by armed groups funded and equipped by Saudi intelligence.

Editorial: Nukes: Iran Now, Saudi Arabia Tomorrow – Investors.com.

Posted 06/30/2011 07:00 PM ET

Mideast: A key Saudi royal warns NATO that a nuclear-armed Iran means Saudi Arabia must attain weapons of mass destruction too. The United States and/or Israel could have prevented this unfolding disaster.

A nuclear arms race begins among Islamic regimes in the Middle East. Our elected leaders and the hyper-educated, lavishly paid diplomats we send abroad are guilty of many years of inexcusable complacency in regard to the ongoing nuclearization of Islamofascist Iran.

But the man on the street who only occasionally watches the news or reads the newspaper knows it’s as big and as frightening a development as the rise of a fascist dictator. And so does the Saudi royal family.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was both Saudi Arabia’s director of intelligence operations and the kingdom’s ambassador to the U.S., warned NATO in June that a nuclear-armed Iran would “compel” his government “to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences.”

For anyone who didn’t catch his drift, Britain’s Guardian newspaper quoted “a senior official in Riyadh who is close to the prince” and who was happy to translate his diplo-speak into straight talk:

“If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.”

Courtesy of WikiLeaks, secret memos from Mideast U.S. embassies revealed last fall that Saudi’s King Abdullah “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.” The Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in April 2008 reportedly repeated the king’s plea that America “cut off the head of the snake” in a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus.

And last summer, the London Times reported that Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defenses so that Israeli bombers could fly over on a mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

All the targets in Iran are at the outer range of Israel’s bombers, even with in-flight refueling; using Saudi airspace would significantly reduce travel time, and the prospects of success, for such a mission.

But Israel would also need at least passive support from the Obama administration, which isn’t in the cards. As former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Human Events last year, the “administration does not manifestly understand” that “an Israeli attack against the Iranian nuclear program would be … supported by the Arab states in the Persian Gulf region … who don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons any more than the Israelis do.”

A nuclear Saudi Arabia could jettison its royal family and go radical as fast as Egypt got rid of the U.S.-allied Mubarak regime earlier this year; the Saudi population almost certainly would do so if a one-man, one-vote free election took place today. Do we really want to wait until then to deal with a Mideast nuclear arms race?

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report June 30, 2011, 6:58 PM (GMT+02:00)

Syrian hand probed in Hariri murder?

The Lebanese capital was not the only the first stop for a delegation of the UN-backed Special Tribal for Lebanon investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Thursday, June 30, the group arrived in Beirut and presented four arrest warrants against top Hizballah officers. Its next destination may be Damascus for the submission of a second batch of warrants against Syrian officials suspected of controlling the Hizballah hit-team in the commission of the murder.

The Lebanese authorities were given 30 days to execute the arrest warrants. Hizballah has offered no response to the indictments but security has been reinforced on the streets of Beirut.

The three wanted Hizballah operatives have been named as Sami Issa and Salim Ayyash, top officers of Hizballah’s security apparatus and close associates of the organization’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, and Mustafa Badreddine, a relative of its late commander, Imad Moughniyeh who died in a bombing attack in Damascus. The fourth is unknown.
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources report the Syrian officials most often mentioned as wanted by the tribunal are Gen. Asif Showqat, brother-in-law of President Bashar Assad, former chief of Syrian military intelligence and currently Syrian chief of staff; and Rostom Ghazale, the Syrian strongman behind the Lebanese government at the time of the murder. Today, he is Assad’s personal arm in suppressing the uprising against his regime in southern and eastern Syria.
For six years, Lebanon has limped from one political crisis to another under the polarizing shadow cast by the assassination of Lebanon’s leading Sunni politician, Rafiq Hariri along with 23 other victims.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon was established to probe the crime and establish guilt, so closing the books on an assassination whose repercussions spread far and wide up until the present day. The court’s investigations have been fought every step of the way by Hizballah, Syria and Iran.

The pro-Western government led by his son, Saad Hariri was overthrown last January after he refused to renounce the court. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei then stepped in on behalf of the Shiite Hizballah, Tehran’s proxy. He ruled any STL indictment “null and void” as the work of a tool of the West and Israel for discrediting Hizballah and breaking up the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah alliance.

Tehran and Damascus then joined hands to replace the Hariri government with a puppet regime headed by Hizballah’s nominee Najib Miqati. After six months of wrangling, he managed earlier this month to form a “unity” government which put Hizballah and its Iranian and Syrian backers firmly in the saddle.
Saad Hariri opted to stay in opposition.

After the tribunal’s sealed indictment was submitted Thursday to Lebanon’s prosecutor general, Miqati gave a news conference in which he clearly played for time to avoid obeying the arrest warrants and extraditing the four Hizballah suspects to Holland.
There was no final word yet on who killed the former prime minister, Miqati declared: “The indictments are not verdicts,” he said, and all suspects are innocent until proved guilty.
However a great deal of water has passed under Middle East bridges since Miqati was picked for the task of invalidating the international tribunal. Today, the “Arab Spring” is venting its fury in Syria, leaving Tehran’s closest ally, Bashar Assad, hanging onto power by a thread in his own country.

Amid the storm of protest against his regime, the Syrian ruler may decide to bar the STL team’s entry to Damascus and so dodge an indictment inculpating his henchmen as the prime movers in the Hariri murder, a step that would reduce Hizballah to the role of accessories.
The impact of this turn of events on Assad’s already shaky regime would be explosive, say debkafile‘s Middle East and military sources – on a par with the Hariri assassination’s destabilizing effect on Lebanon in the past six years.
If, as expected, Damascus and Beirut flout the tribunal’s indictments and refuse to extradite the suspects and witnesses named therein, they will lay themselves open to the court’s application to the UN Security Council for sanctions against both their governments to enforce their compliance.

Neither Russia nor China will have grounds for voting against such motions without appearing to support state-sponsored terrorism and political assassination.

Therefore, if Assad is not toppled by his own people, he and his close family and helpers may find themselves in the dock on both those charges. One way or another, he appears to be heading to join the list of Arab rulers targeted by the US and Europe for removal.