WarSclerotic

Third blast hits Turkish town of Reyhanli – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Published: 05.11.13, 19:47 / Israel News

A third explosion rocked the Turkish town of Reyhanli on Saturday, hours after a double car bomb attack left at least 40 dead, reported the NTV news channel. The third blast occurred in an area several hundred meters from the city center, NTV said, adding that multiple teams of firefighters, paramedics and security forces were trying to reach the scene. (AFP)

UPDATE

REYHANLI, Turkey – A third, small blast caused panic in a Turkish town near the Syrian border on Saturday hours after twin car bombs killed around 40 people, but local reporters said it appeared to have been caused by a car engine or building boiler room.

The two car bombs that exploded in the early afternoon in Reyhanli ripped into crowded streets and scattered cars and concrete blocks in the town in the southern Hatay province, home to thousands of Syrian refugees.

Two car bombs explode in Turkish town near Syrian border, killing 40 – Middle East – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

( Given Turkey’s recent interventionist pressure, this has all the makings of a “false flag”attack.  On the other hand, considering who they are up against.. – JW )

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vows that Turkey would act against anyone attempting to bring ‘external chaos’ into his country; there was no immediate confirmation of Syrian involvement.

Two car bombs exploded in a Turkish town near the border with Syria on Saturday, killing around 40 people and wounding 100 others, officials said. Turkey’s deputy prime minister said Syria’s intelligence and military were “the usual suspects” behind the bombings, but said authorities were still investigating the attacks.

The blasts, which were 15 minutes apart, raised fears that Syria’s brutal civil war violence was crossing into its neighbor.

One of the car bombs exploded outside the city hall while the other went off outside the post office in the town of Reyhanli, a main hub for Syrian refugees and rebel activity in Turkey’s Hatay province, just across the border. Images showed people frantically carrying victims through the rubble-strewn streets to safety.

Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said about 40 people were killed and 100 others wounded in the blasts and linked them to Syria. There was no immediate information on the identities or nationalities of the victims.

“We know that the Syrian refugees have become a target of the Syrian regime,” he said. “Reyhanli was not chosen by coincidence.”

“Our thoughts are that their mukhabarat (Syrian intelligence agency) and armed organizations are the usual suspects in planning and the carrying out of such devilish plans,” he said.

Arinc said Turkey would “do whatever is necessary” if proven that Syria is behind the attack.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier also raised the possibility that the bombings may be related to Turkey’s peace talks with Kurdish rebels meant to end a nearly 30-year-old conflict.

Syrian mortar rounds have fallen over the border before, but if the explosion turns out to be linked to Syria it would be by far the biggest death toll in Turkey related to its neighbor’s civil war.

Syria shares a more than 500-mile border with Turkey, which has been a crucial supporter of the Syrian rebel cause. Ankara has allowed its territory to be used as a logistics base and staging center for Syrian insurgents.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vowed from Berlin that Turkey would act.

“Those who for whatever reason attempt to bring the external chaos into our country will get a response,” he said.

Syrian opposition condemns attack

The main Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, condemned the “terrorist attacks” in Reyhanli, saying it stands together with the “Turkish government and the friendly Turkish people.”

The coalition sees “these heinous terrorist acts as an attempt to take revenge on the Turkish people and punish them for their honorable support for the Syrian people,” it said.

Reyhanli is a center for aid and alleged weapon trafficking between Turkey and Syria, as well as for Syrian rebel activity. Apart from refugees living in camps, many Syrians escaping the civil war have also rented houses in the town.

The explosions came days before Erdogan is scheduled to travel to the U.S. for talks, which are expected to be dominated by the situation in Syria.

“This … will increase the pressure on the U.S. president next week to do something to show support to Turkey when Erdogan visits him in Washington,” said Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey at the Washington Institute. “Washington will be forced to take a more pro-active position on Syria, at least in rhetoric, whether or not there is appetite for such a position here.”

Abdullah, a Reyhanli resident, told The Associated Press he heard two strong explosions at about 1 P.M. “The bombs were very powerful,” he said by telephone.

The frontier area has seen heavy fighting between rebels and the Syrian regime. In February, a car bomb exploded at a border crossing with Turkey in Syria’s Idlib province, killing 14. Turkey’s interior minister has blamed Syria’s intelligence agencies and its army for involvement.

Four Syrians and a Turk are in custody in connection with the Feb. 11 attack at the Bab al-Hawa frontier post. No one has claimed responsibility, but a Syrian opposition faction accused the Syrian government of the bombing, saying it narrowly missed 13 leaders of the group.

In that bombing, most of the victims were Syrians who had been waiting in an area straddling the frontier for processing to enter Turkey.

Tensions flared between the Syrian regime and Turkey after shells fired from Syria landed on the Turkish side, prompting Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. to send two batteries of Patriot air defense missiles each to protect their NATO ally.

Netanyahu to visit Putin in a bid to stop his S-300 missile sale to Syria.

( Call me paranoid.  I don’t believe that the S-300 sale is the reason Netanyahu insisted on and received a meeting with Putin.  Something much bigger is afoot.  – JW )

Moscow’s decision to sell those weapons to Syria was first revealed by debkafile on May 7.

Our sources now add that the prime minister’s chances of averting the sale are extremely slim. A series of prominent figures have already tried talking the Russian president out of the sale and failed, starting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on May 7, followed Friday May 10 by British premier David Cameron who saw Putin in Sochi and German Foreign Minister Guido Westernwelle who met his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov in Warsaw.

They all warned the Russian leader that the delivery of S-300 missiles to Syria would touch off an arms race in Syria and the Middle East with disastrous consequences.
Lavrov told reporters: “Russia is not planning to sell S-300 to Syria. Russia has already sold them a long time ago. It has signed the contracts and is completing deliveries in line with them of equipment which is anti-aircraft technology.”

Rejecting all their arguments, Putin said his government would stand by all its commitments to the Syrian ruler Bashar Assad and defend his regime. After Israel’s air strike against Damascus on May 5, nothing would now stop the S-300 deliveries.
The Russian president, in a phone call he put in to the Israeli premier on May 7 when the latter was visiting Shanghai, warned Israel against any further attacks on Syria.

He later spurned the approaches by Western leaders by stating that Moscow would never permit another US-led NATO air campaign against Assad like the one that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in 2011. He added that Russian arms sales to Syria and Iran were Moscow’s response to the large arms packages US Defense Minister Chuck Hagel brought to Israel and US Gulf allies in the last week of April.

The S-300 is designed to shoot down planes and missiles at 200-km ranges.
Israel is concerned that Moscow may decided to send the six S-300 batteries carrying 144 missiles due for Syria along with Russian missile and air defense specialists. They will officially be described as instructors for training Syrian crews in the use of the sophisticated anti-air weapons. But they will also be available for operating the missiles effectively for downing Israeli Air Force planes striking targets in Syria and Lebanon. Israel will be forced to think twice before attacking the S-300 batteries for fear of hitting the Russian officers. Putin is therefore placing a severe constraint on Israel’s operational freedom by spreading an anti-air missile cover over the Syrian, Hizballah and the Iranian Basij forces fighting for Bashar Assad.
Since the chances of dissuading Putin to abandon this strategy are just about nil, the best Netanyahu can hope for by his face-to-face with the Russian president is a limited accord on ground rules for averting an Israeli-Russian military clash in Syria.

In Syria’s war, the lines that matter aren’t red – The Washington Post.

( Want to understand the Syrian tragedy?  This is the best article I’ve read on the subject.  Be forewarned… It’s sad and scary. – JW )

By Fouad Ajami, Published: May 9

Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Syrian Rebellion” and “Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey.”

It is rarely a good idea to draw maps in a hurry. But that is what colonial cartographers did in the Arab world after the First World War, and the borders they painted were superimposed on old tribal and religious attachments that long predated the new states.

Today, the folly of those lines is made clear, as Syria’s war threatens not just its territorial unity but that of its neighbors as well.

Alas, it was perhaps optimistic to ever imagine that the fighting between Syria’s Alawite regime and the Sunni-led rebellion would remain within the country’s borders. Syria is at once the pivot and a mirror of the Fertile Crescent, and its sectarian and ethnic fissures reproduce themselves in neighboring Arab states. As an oddly passive President Obama ponders what he might do in Syria — and whether to do anything at all — he should be less preoccupied with red lines of his own making than with the blurring of the lines drawn in Arab sands decades ago.

On the map, Tripoli, on the Mediterranean Sea, lies within the borders of Lebanon and is the country’s second-largest city. But Tripoli, staunchly Sunni, with an Alawite minority, has always been within the orbit of the Syrian city of Homs. So it is no mystery that a deadly conflict now rages in Tripoli between Sunni and Alawite neighborhoods, rendering the place ungovernable. Sunni jihadists and preachers see the Syrian struggle as their own, an opportunity to evict the Alawites from their midst and to restore Sunni primacy.

Look to Iraq, on Syria’s eastern border, for the region’s quintessential artificial entity. Today, the government in Baghdad, Shiite-led for the first time in a millennium, sides with the Alawite dictatorship in Damascus. But in western Iraq, the Sunni strongholds of Anbar province and Mosul have been stirred up by the Syrian rebellion. The same tribes straddle the border between the two countries. Smugglers and traders, and now Sunni warriors, pay that border no heed.

The American war upended the order of things in Iraq; the Sunni minority lost out to the Shiites and bristled under that change of fortunes. The Syrian rebellion, a Sunni upheaval against an Alawite minority, has been a boon to the Sunnis of Iraq. The Sunnis have bottomless grievances against the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. To them, Maliki, who spent a quarter-century exiled in Syria and Iran, is an agent of the Iranian theocracy. So even though the regime in Syria did its best to subvert the new order in Baghdad — between 2003 and 2009, Syria was the transit point for jihadists converging on Iraq to fight the Americans and the Shiites — the Maliki government, with oil money, and anchored in the power of the (Shiite) Dawa party, is throwing a lifeline to the Syrian dictator.

The Shiite appetite in Iraq has grown with the eating. Anti-terrorism laws and the provisions of de-Baathification have been unleashed on the Sunnis, and the forces of order have become instruments of the Maliki government. Thousands languish in prison on spurious charges, and protests have broken out in Sunni cities. The Syrian conflict has added fuel to the fire. If the Sunnis needed proof that the Shiite coalition in the region (comprising Iran, the Iraqi state, the Alawite regime in Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon) is hell-bent on robbing them of their historic place in Iraq, their government’s tilt toward Bashar al-Assad provided it.

It was a matter of time before these millennial conflicts were given new life by the Syrian civil war, which has acquired the passion of a religious calling. So Shiite warriors from Iraq and Lebanon flock to Syria today, they tell us, to protect the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab in the eastern suburbs of Damascus. It is easy work for Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, to dispatch young foot soldiers to Damascus and drape his support for the Syrian dictator in the garb of religious duty.

Terrorist groups, Nasrallah said on April 30, had threatened to overrun and destroy the shrine. “If such a crime were to take place, it will carry with it grave consequences,” he warned. “Countries supporting these groups will be held responsible for this crime.”

Nasrallah is not a subtle man. He proclaimed nothing less than a sectarian war over Syria: “Syria has real friends in the region, and the world will not allow Syria to fall into the hands of America, Israel and the takfiri groups,” or militant Islamists. Nasrallah, very much in the tradition of Maliki in Baghdad, offended the Sunnis in his own country. Sunni preachers in Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli have called on their own to rise to the defense of the Syrian rebellion.

The schism over Syria was given away in a Pew survey released May 1 that found 91 percent of Lebanon’s Shiites had a favorable opinion of Assad, and 8 percent held an unfavorable one. The results among the country’s Sunnis were the reverse: 7 percent favorable, 92 percent unfavorable. Such estrangement in a small, claustrophobic country!

Syria’s war plays out differently among its neighbors. Jordan, through no choice of its own, is caught up in the struggle as southern Syria, for all practical purposes, spills over its border. An estimated 500,000 Syrians have made their way into Jordan — almost a staggering 10 percent of that country’s population. Jordan is overwhelmingly Sunni, so it has been spared the virulence of the vendettas blowing through Iraq and Lebanon. But it has its own fault line — between a secular monarchy and a strong Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is invested in the success of the rebellion in Syria, and the monarchy is on edge. It can’t close its border in the face of the Syrians, and it struggles to cope with a huge economic burden amid its own scarcities. It waits for deliverance — help from the Gulf Arabs and from the United States — and prays for an end to this war from hell.

Israel is, of course, a Syrian neighbor apart. Wisely, it initially kept a policy of benign yet watchful neglect of this fight. There was no love lost for the Syrian dictatorship but no faith that the rebels would make better neighbors if and when they came to power. On the one hand, the dictatorship, under Assad and his father before him, had kept the peace on the Israeli-Syrian border. But the Syrians had also stoked tensions on the Lebanese-Israeli frontier and had given Iran access to the Mediterranean, so perilously close to Israel. It was the better part of wisdom to steer clear of Syria’s fire.

But alleged Israeli airstrikes over Damascus in recent days have demonstrated the limits of Israel’s patience. The targets were depots of Iranian missiles, meant to be delivered to Hezbollah. These missiles had a range of 200 miles and could carry half-ton warheads. The Israelis made good on their “red line.” They would not permit Hezbollah that kind of power over their security.

Even with all this instability, I don’t believe that the borders of the Fertile Crescent will be erased. Western Iraq will not secede and join Syria, nor will Tripoli slip into Syria. But a Syria ruled by a Sunni majority would rewrite the rules of the region’s politics.

It could put an end to the militarization of Syrian society that has wrecked that country. Free of despotism, the Syrian middle class might erect the foundations of a more open and merciful nation. Syria is a land of merchants and commerce, and therein lies the hope that a better country could emerge from this ruin.

Lebanon, too, would be given a chance at normalcy. The power of Hezbollah in that country has derived to a great extent from the power of the Syrian dictatorship. If Syria is transformed, Lebanon must change as well, and the power of Hezbollah could be cut down to size. Utopia will not visit the region after the fall of the Syrian tyranny, but there is no denying that better politics may take hold in Syria and in its immediate neighborhood.

The remarkable thing about this drawn-out fight, now entering its third year, is the passivity of the United States. A region of traditional American influence has been left to fend for itself.

Of course, these sectarian enmities do not lend themselves to an outsider’s touch. Nor did Obama call up these furies; they cannot be laid at his doorstep. But the unwillingness of his administration to make a clean break with Assad helped radicalize the Syrian rebellion. The landscape would have been altered by American help. A no-fly zone near the border with Turkey could have sheltered and aided the rebels. An early decision to arm the rebellion would have leveled the killing field. Four of the president’s principal foreign policy advisers from his first term advocated giving weapons to the rebels — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeusand the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey. But the president overrode them, his caution of no help in a conflict of such virulence.

Under the gaze of the world, Obama instead drew a red line on the use of chemical weapons and warned that his calculus would change if these weapons were used or moved around. He thus placed his credibility in the hands of the Syrian dictator and, in the midst of a storm of his own making, fell back on lawyerly distinctions.

A Greater Middle East, an Islamic world, used to American campaigns of rescue — Kuwait in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 — is now witnessing the ebb of American power and responsibility. Obama has held his fire in the face of great slaughter, and truth be known, congressional and popular opinion have given him a pass. America has wearied of Middle Eastern wars.

Syrian rebels sure that the American cavalry would turn up after this or that massacre have been bitterly disappointed. It’s the tragic luck of the Syrians that their rebellion has happened on the watch of an American president who has made a fetish of caution, who has seen the risks of action and overlooked the consequences of abdication.

Kremlin confirms Netanyahu to meet Putin in Russia | JPost | Israel News.

Israel’s scattered messages – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

5 reasons Syria’s war suddenly looks more dangerous – CNN.com.

 

(CNN) — While the world’s attention was focused on Boston and North Korea, the conflict in Syria entered a new phase — one that threatens to embroil its neighbors in a chaotic way and pose complex challenges to the Obama administration.

 

What began as a protest movement long ago became an uprising that metastasized into a war, a vicious whirlpool dragging a whole region toward it.

 

Many analysts believe the United States can do little to influence — let alone control — the situation. And it could make things worse. Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics argues against the United States “plunging into the killing fields of Syria … because it would complicate and exacerbate an already dangerous conflict.”

 

Others contend that if the United States remains on the sidelines, regional actors will fight each other to “inherit” Syria, and hostile states such as Iran and North Korea will take note of American hesitancy. They say inaction has given free rein to more extreme forces.

 

And in the wake of the strikes against Damascus, apparently by Israeli planes, critics argue that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is now more vulnerable than ever and U.S. intervention could help finish him off.

 

Republican Sen. John McCain has revived calls for a no-fly zone. And introducing legislation to arm the Syrian rebels in the U.S. Senate on Monday, Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez said: “There will be no greater strategic setback to Iran than to have the Assad regime collapse, and cause a disruption to the terror pipeline between Tehran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

 

But more than two years since the revolt against al-Assad began, regional analysts say Syria is in danger of becoming the next Somalia, which collapsed into fiefdoms 20 years ago and has been stalked by anarchy, terrorism and hunger ever since. Except Syria would be worse. Its religious and ethnic fault lines extend across borders in every direction; Somalia’s anarchy was largely self-contained. Somalia never had chemical weapons, nor the missiles and modern armor that make Syria one of the most crowded arsenals in the world.

 

And unlike Syria, Somalia was never central to a titanic struggle between different branches of Islam: Sunni and Shia.

 

Given that background, here are five reasons Syria’s war suddenly looks more dangerous.

 

1: Israel and Hezbollah’s proxy war

 

For two years, Israel has looked on with growing anxiety as brutal repression in Syria has become de facto civil war. Now a high-octane game of regional poker is under way. The Israelis have not admitted carrying out the devastating strikes of last week, but U.S. officials tell CNN they have no doubt Israel was responsible.

 

Why would Israel suddenly become an active participant? While much has been said about President Barack Obama’s “red line” — that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would make him reassess U.S. involvement — the Israelis have a different threshold: the transfer of advanced missiles to al-Assad’s ally, the Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

 

Their main worry, U.S. officials say, was the possible transfer of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles, whose accuracy would pose a new threat to Israel. A consignment of these ballistic missiles had recently arrived at Damascus’ airport. Similarly, the second Israeli strike before dawn Sunday was on a “research facility” near Damascus where weapons destined for Hezbollah were kept.

 

According to Jane’s Intelligence, Iran’s Defense Ministry reported the test firing of an upgraded Fateh-110 last year, and the Iranian Aerospace Industries Organization claimed it had a range in excess of 180 miles (300 kilometers.)

 

Israel’s motive was not to degrade the Syrian military. It was about sending al-Assad a message (copied to Iran and Hezbollah): “If you try to raise the regional stakes by passing a new generation of short-range ballistic missiles to Hezbollah, the response will be swift and severe.”

 

Gerges, author of “Obama and the Middle East,” told CNN that we are seeing “an open-ended war by proxy. … On the one hand you have Israel, regional powers and the Western states; on the other hand you have Iran, Hezbollah and Syria.”

 

Is Syrian war escalating to wider conflict?

 

Middle East analyst Juan Cole agrees, writing on his blog: “It is not that the Israelis and Hezbollah are in any direct conflict, but they are gradually both becoming more active in Syria on opposite sides. It is an open question how long this process can continue before the conflict does become direct.”

 

One miscalculation could provoke a wider escalation.

 

The stakes for Hezbollah are enormous. For nearly 30 years, it has been sustained by Iranian and Syrian support. If Syria becomes a Sunni-dominated state, Hezbollah’s “rear-base” vanishes, and suddenly it looks more vulnerable to its archenemy Israel, one of whose strategic goals is to counter the growing missile threat from the north.

Military analysts believe Hezbollah has an arsenal of some 50,000 missiles and rockets, supported by a sophisticated, hardened infrastructure that would be even harder to uproot than during its last conflict with Israel in 2006. Little wonder that Israel has deployed two of its Iron Dome missile-defense batteries in its northern cities.

 

Will the Syrians retaliate for the strikes, which they describe as a declaration of war by Israel? To do so would divert resources from the regime’s battle for survival. Not to do so would convey an image of weakness in the face of the “Zionist enemy.”

 

Al-Assad has a history of not retaliating against Israel, most notably when the Israelis took out what was purported to be a Syrian nuclear installation in 2007. According to Cliff Kupchan with the Eurasia Group, Israel has calculated that “Bashar al-Assad is incapable of fighting on two fronts, that Iran will keep its powder dry for a possible future conflict over its nuclear program, and that Hezbollah will not attempt significant retribution without approval from its sponsors.”

 

But one risk to Israel is that in weakening the Assad regime, it may strengthen some of the best organized and most potent rebel factions: jihadist groups such as the al-Nusra Front, which has already declared its affiliation with al Qaeda in Iraq.

 

2: More than ever, it’s sectarian

 

In the early days of the Syrian uprising, people who were anti- and pro-regime shared one common dread: that Syria would descend, Bosnia-style, into sectarian horror. Now, in the fight to prevail, that has become a reality.

 

Moderates have been sidelined, and despite efforts to revitalize the opposition’s political leadership in exile there is still no umbilical cord between the government-in-waiting and the fighters inside Syria.

 

The Free Syrian Army coexists with a strong Sunni jihadi element, while the regime is mobilizing “irregular” Alawite militia and Hezbollah fighters.

 

Syria’s (largely Sunni) rebels say hundreds if not thousands of (Shia) Hezbollah fighters are now fighting for the Assad regime. Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, said last week that his party would not stand by and watch the Assad government fall. Regional analysts believe there is a very real risk that along the poorly marked Syrian-Lebanese border, Sunni jihadists will come up against Hezbollah units, setting off a vicious war-within-a-war.

 

The Syrian opposition sees Iran and Hezbollah everywhere. The head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel-Rahman told the newspaper Asharq al-Awsat that “Iranian and Hezbollah officers are running the operations room in the battle for Homs and are controlling the army operations in the city.”

 

He warned of “massacres against the Sunni community living in the besieged areas if the army captures these areas.”

 

Such massacres were reported in the past week in the coastal Sunni enclaves in Baniyas and al-Bayda. The State Department said over the weekend that “regime and shabiha forces reportedly destroyed the area with mortar fire, then stormed the town and executed entire families, including women and children.”

 

3: Al-Assad goes for broke?

 

After being on the defensive for months, the Syrian regime has recently launched a series of brutal counterattacks against areas controlled by rebel factions, seeking to restore precious lines of communication and reconnect Damascus with other parts of the country. In so doing, it appears Assad has relied even more on the shabiha — loyalists with an existential stake in the regime’s survival.

 

As veteran Middle East watcher Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has put it: “The Assad regime seems ready to escalate in any way it can to either preserve power or effectively divide the country.”

 

Among the areas where this counteroffensive has been most intense is Daraya, south of the capital, which has been reduced to ruins on the principle that “if we can’t control it nor shall you.” To the east of Damascus, regime forces have encircled rebels in the Gouta region, relieving the immediate threat to Damascus airport, which is at one end of the critical air bridge between Syria and Iran.

 

As critical as these areas around Damascus is the town of Qusayr between Homs and the Lebanese border, once home to 50,000 people. Videos uploaded in recent days show the regime pouring artillery fire into the town and conducting airstrikes from above; whole blocks have been demolished. Claims emerged Wednesday from opposition sources of new massacres around the town.

 

Qusayr sits astride one route to the Syrian coast and another to the Lebanese border. For the rebels, holding Qusayr is important because it’s another way of strangling the regime’s ability to sustain itself, and it complicates Hezbollah’s access to Syria.

 

The signs are that al-Assad is investing heavily in trying to break the rebels’ hold in key parts of south and central Syria, reversing the gains they had made in a series of hard-won victories last year.

 

Short of forceful foreign intervention, some military analysts argue for tying al-Assad’s hands behind his back by providing the rebels with more anti-armor and anti-aircraft missiles and a communications infrastructure. More ambitiously, some say the international community should enforce what might be called a “no-move” zone, selectively picking off regime forces from the air or with missiles.

 

In essence, that’s what NATO’s mission in Libya became. But it would take considerable airpower and the use of facilities across the region to gain control of the Syrian sky. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said at the end of April: “The U.S. military has the capability to defeat that system (of Syrian air defenses), but it would be a greater challenge, and would take longer and require more resources” than in Libya.

 

4: Chemical Weapons

 

For much of last year, Obama’s “red line” seemed a largely hypothetical one. But as al-Assad’s situation grows more desperate and control of chemical weapons stocks more difficult to guarantee, there are indications that some chemical agents have been used in limited quantities in places like Daraya. The questions are: how much, of what and by whom?

 

The announcement by a senior U.N. official Monday that rebels may have used sarin gas during an operation near Aleppo in March means this red line is even more difficult to discern. The U.N. commission subsequently said it “has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict.”

 

Establishing “custody” and the systematic use of such weapons is very difficult in the absence of monitors on the ground.

 

A U.S. State Department official on Monday would say only: “We take any reports of use of chemical weapons very seriously and we are trying to get as many facts as possible to understand what is happening.”

 

But understanding and countering the threat are miles apart. The Pentagon estimated last year it might take 70,000 troops to secure or destroy Syria’s massive stockpiles — and the situation on the ground has deteriorated since then.

 

In Cordesman’s view, “Any U.S. forces that tried to deal with the chemical weapons in Syria through ground raids would present the problem of getting them in, having them fight their way to an objective, taking the time to destroy chemical stocks, and then safely leaving.”

 

5: Players and Puppets: Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan

 

Syria is surrounded by neighbors with a stake in influencing the outcome of its civil war. Most — and other more distant states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia — are backing their own factions as well as supporting the “government-in-waiting.” Now more than ever they feel the force of that whirlpool.

 

Iraq’s beleaguered Sunni minority is more and more in confrontation with a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad allied to Iran. The Sunni tribes of Anbar and Ramadi have historical connections with their brethren across the border and would welcome a Sunni-dominated government in Syria as a valuable counterbalance to a hostile government at home.

 

For more than a year, there have been persistent reports of weapons crossing the border to help the Syrian resistance and evidence of co-operation between Syrian and Iraqi jihadists. Resupply convoys headed through Iraq to the Syrian regime have been ambushed in recent months.

 

In the view of Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, “Iraq is teetering back towards civil war, with direct implications for the investment climate across the country, and deepening geopolitical conflict between Iran and the Sunni monarchies” of the Gulf.

 

Turkey is also growing alarmed at the prospect of a more “Balkanized” Syria. It already has 322,000 refugees on its soil, according to latest figures from the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, with another 100,000 clamoring to cross.

 

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has upped his rhetoric in recent days, criticizing the Israeli strikes but reserving his most passionate denunciation for the Assad regime.

 

“You, Bashar Assad, will pay for this. You will pay heavily, very heavily for showing courage you can’t show to others, to babies with pacifiers in their mouths,” he told an audience over the weekend.

 

But Erdogan is struggling to turn indignation into influence. As the International Crisis Group noted in March: Turkey “now has an uncontrollable, fractured, radicalized no-man’s-land on its doorstep.”

 

The Jordanians know how that feels. They are trying to cope with 450,000 Syrian refugees — equivalent to some 7% of the Jordanian population — growing restless and desperate in makeshift camps. The number in Lebanon has shot up to 455,000, according to the United Nations. In all, the Syrian conflict has generated an extra half million refugees in just two months.

 

Lebanon — whose sectarian equation mirrors that in Syria — cannot help but be dragged into the war next door. Several Salafist sheikhs in Lebanon have declared jihad against the Syrian regime in response to Hezbollah’s growing involvement. One of them, Sheikh Ahmed Assir, called on Sunnis in the city of Sidon to form brigades to help the resistance in Qusayr. And rocket fire, apparently from the Free Syrian Army, has landed in Shiite areas around the Lebanese town of Hermel.

 

A land of bad options

 

Some critics of the Obama administration say there is a moral imperative to intervene in Syria in the face of slaughter (at least 70,000 Syrians have died so far.) In the Washington Post, former Obama adviser Anne Marie Slaughter has recalled the “shameful” failure to confront genocide in Rwanda.

 

But Cordesman writes: “Syria has become the land of bad options. The Obama administration has reason to hesitate in intervening.”

 

And Joshua Landis, who runs the blog Syria Comment and is director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, warns that even “a humanitarian intervention will become a nation-building project, as was the case in Iraq.”

 

With the number of internally displaced now put at 4.25 million people, that would be a huge project.

 

The dream among diplomats a year ago was that a moderate opposition could be brought together with some regime elements to ease al-Assad from power. As the Syrian war threatens to become a regional one, the United States and Russia are dusting off that option, calling for an international conference within weeks that would be attended by both the government and the opposition.

 

“The alternative is that Syria heads closer to the abyss, if not over the abyss and into chaos,” said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Palestinian-Syrian group forming units to fight for Golan | JPost | Israel News.