TANGIER, MOROCCO – An extraordinarily blunt message hit the Clinton administration back in Washington like a rocket: The United States, it said, was standing idly by as the Middle East peace process was foundering. If Washington didn’t get its act together, and fast, the region would explode in violence.
The message was all the more extraordinary considering the source. It was from Crown Prince Abdallah of Saudi Arabia, America’s closest and most important Arab ally. And in case the U.S. didn’t get the message, Prince Abdallah — the de facto ruler of the oil-rich kingdom since his brother King Fahd suffered a stroke — made a point of repeating the message to Henry Siegman, a Middle East specialist with the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations who spent three hours last week with the Saudi regent in Riyadh.
“He was furious, livid about how little the Americans were doing to save the peace process,” said Siegman, who later came to Tangier to attend a conference on relations between the United States and the Arab world. “He said America’s reluctance to confront Israel’s settlement policies in Jerusalem and the West Bank would destroy the entire peace process.”
Abdallah’s message, the existence of which was confirmed to Salon by a senior Saudi official close to the prince, is noteworthy because such messages are so rare. It’s also a symptom of the despair and anger that is coursing through the Arab world and was readily apparent at the conference attended by academics, journalists and writers in Tangier. Even the bomb blast in the Jerusalem market, which occurred on the eve of the conference opening, did little to assuage the anti-Israel and anti-U.S. feelings. While many of the attendees were appalled at the bloodshed, they said recent Israeli government actions had brought the terrorist action down on Jewish heads.
Such bitterness was echoed by Prince Abdallah during his conversation with Siegman, when he accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being responsible for an incendiary poster that appeared recently in the West Bank town of Hebron. The poster, depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a pig, ignited several weeks of Palestinian rioting. “When I reminded the crown prince that Netanyahu had no part in that poster (Netanyahu publicly condemned the poster and ordered the arrest of the Jewish settler who put it up), Abdallah said he was speaking about Netanyahu’s moral responsibility as a leader in creating the political climate for such insults,” Siegman said.
“Then he reminded me that this was not the first time that Netanyahu had created a climate of hatred and violence. He said Leah Rabin (widow of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) had accused Netanyahu of fomenting the climate that led to her husband’s murder.”
The intensity of feeling does not bode well for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s new peace initiative, which she launched only after Palestinian suicide bombs killed 14 Israelis and plunged the already battered peace process to new depths. The initiative calls for an Israeli freeze on further Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank while Israelis and Palestinians start fast-track negotiations toward a final settlement. Special Middle East envoy Dennis Ross was in the region Sunday trying to get talks restarted. Albright will make her first visit to the Middle East at the end of the month.
For many of the experts at the Tangier conference, it’s time for the U.S. to put up or shut up. “The United States has to decide whether it wants peace with the Arabs or whether it wants Jewish settlements,” said Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, a veteran political analyst for the Egyptian newspaper al Ahram. “It cannot have both, and it is deluding itself to think that it can.”
GlobalPost correspondent James Foley spent 44 days in captivity inside Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. This first chapter of his story originally appeared on GlobalPost. For the full series, click here.
There is a single main highway along which lies every major city between the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the east and the capital Tripoli in the west. It snakes along the coast and passes through Ajdabiya, Brega, Sirte and Misrata, cities made world famous by months of back and forth, and deadly, conflict.
The four of us were riding in the back of a blazing red minibus at the beginning of April, approaching the strategic oil town of Brega, where the worst fighting of the conflict had been taking place. Our driver was a teenage boy, like his friend in the passenger’s seat. The so-called front in this war was always changing. But we had already passed the last rebel checkpoint and we knew whatever front existed was beginning to reveal itself.
Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.
We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.
Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.
Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.
We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.
“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.
With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.
Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:
I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.
“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.
“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.
****
I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.
But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.
Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.
I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.
I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.
As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.
With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.
Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.
But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.
Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.
We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.
The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.
“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.
****
The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.
I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.
There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.
As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.
I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.
A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.
Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.
“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.
WARSAW, Poland — I woke up this morning to the news that Anthony Shadid has died — apparently of an asthma attack — while on assignment in Syria. Whether you knew his byline or not, the loss is incalculable.
I can speak in absolutes about the quality of his work. No one reported the Middle East with greater clarity and nuance than Shadid. No one brought the humanity of the people of the region, people who live in a perpetual state of stress even when they are living in the comparative comfort of Beirut and Tel Aviv, to the wider world with a surer touch than Anthony.
He could have coasted on his one great advantage — fluency in Arabic — to beat other reporters to the story. He did not. He used it as a foundation to serve readers — and help colleagues. When I left Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, a sizeable part of my heart was left behind with new friends who were struggling to make the country a better place. Amid the constant shifts in the chaotic post-war era, Anthony’s dispatches were the ones I relied on to give me the complete picture of what was happening around the country.
American reporters are trained to be objective. It is an ideal to aspire to, more than an achievable goal. We are human beings and those of us who cover conflicts have our emotions challenged every day. The desire to bear witness and to make readers and listeners feel what we feel is overwhelming. Sometimes this gets in the way of objectivity. Anthony, who saw more terrible things than most, managed to stay closer to that ideal than any one. That’s what makes his reporting the best and why in years to come, it will truly be seen as the first draft of history.
We published books on Iraq at the same time and shared a panel at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. on Iraq. I had long since decided that objectivity was getting in the way of my reporting. It was important to let my readers know that I was angry and that my friend had died because of the criminally poor planning of the bigwigs in Washington. That emotion suffused my book. Anthony’s book was scrupulously written, you could never guess what he felt about the war.
My memory is that during the course of the conversation I pressed him about keeping his feelings about the war out of the book. He came back at me with full vigor, eloquently defending the importance of objectivity. He was a big-hearted, supremely talented man — and disciplined about the work. The panel was recorded by C-Span and you can watch Anthony and get some sense of who he was and what we have lost here.
The explosions in Bangkok on Tuesday that destroyed an Israeli diplomat’s car escalated the already-dangerous situation between Iran and Israel. Israel’s defense minister connected the attacks with others on Israeli embassy personnel in India and Georgia. “Israel will act methodically and take strong yet patient action against the international terrorism that originates in Iran,” warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For its part, the Iranian regime strongly rejected the charges, angrily claiming the attacks were the work of Israel itself. Each week seems to bring fresh evidence that a full-blown Iranian-Israeli war is growing more likely, a conflict that could engulf the entire Middle East and draw in the United States.
Yet it would be a mistake to believe that Israel and Iran are eternal enemies. In fact, these two countries that despise each other so much — Iran’s Supreme Leader recently called Israel a “cancer” — were once allies. This is not ancient history. Both pre- and post-Revolutionary Iran had extensive military and economic ties with the Jewish state. As recently as two decades ago, each country considered the other a vital friend in a region filled with hostile enemies. Conflict between the two may be bitter, but it is not, and never was, inevitable.
Iran informally recognized Israel in 1950, becoming the first Muslim-majority country after Turkey to do so. With few allies in the region, Israel welcomed Iran’s modest support. That support increased when England and the United States overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, installing in its place a more Western-friendly regime. The new regime, headed by the Shah, was so aligned with the United States that a deal was stuck granting the Persian nation a huge nuclear energy program, as well as large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium — two pathways to a nuclear bomb.
The Israeli-Iranian alliance was a part of the Shah’s pro-Western orientation. “The Shah looked at Israel as a way to establish friendly relations with the U.S.,” says the Rand Corp.’s Dalia Dassa Kaye, co-author of a recent monograph on Iranian-Israeli relations. Israel saw Iran as a way to escape its regional isolation. “They were bound by common enemies: the Soviet Union, and Arab nationalism, especially Iraq,” says Kaye.
The alliance, though never formalized or publicized because of Israel’s unpopularity in the region, consisted of deep intelligence and arms cooperation, as well as oil sharing. In the late 1950s, Israel, Iran and Turkey formed a trilateral intelligence alliance and performed counterterrorism intelligence operations. In the early 1960s, they teamed up to support Iraqi Kurds fighting the central regime. According to Kaye’s research, “Tehran and Tel Aviv developed a close military and intelligence relationship that would continue to expand until the Islamic revolution.”
The extent of this alliance should not be exaggerated. The Shah kept Iran’s relationship with Israel secretive for fear of rousing his own anti-Israeli population as well as those of Iran’s neighbors. Instead, “the alliance was based on the perception of common threats,” says Trita Parsi, author of a prizewinning book on relations between Israel, Iran and the United States. But the threats emanating from the Soviet Union, Iran and the Arab bloc were perceived as so serious that they outlasted the Shah’s overthrow in 1979.
The Islamist government that took power in Iran in 1979 was deeply hostile to all things Western, Zionism not least among them. And yet, the requirements of Iranian national interest trumped ideology to force the Islamic government to cooperate with the hated Jewish state on a number of issues. Once the U.S.-supported Iraqi government invaded Iran, the Persian state turned to Israel for much-needed arms. Phantom fighter planes and weapons for the Iranian army were sent by Israel. One estimate puts Israel’s arms sales to Iran at $500 million annually.
In the mid-1980s Israel was the conduit between Iran and the Reagan administration during the illicit Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to the Iranians and used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragua. Even as it was relying more on Israel for arms in its war, the Iranian regime increased its poisonous rhetoric attacking the Jewish state, just as the Shah had done. According to the Iranian-born Parsi, such rhetoric was meant to maintain credibility in the wider Muslim world, but wasn’t matched by action. “Israel is Iran’s best friend and we do not intend to change our position,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in 1987.
Two events caused the gradual splitting between the erstwhile allies. First, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, removing the greatest threat outside of the region to both nations’ security. Second, the weakening of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War diluted its menace. Simply put, Iran and Israel needed each other less, as both were more secure in the post-Cold War world. As Parsi wrote in “The Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States,” “the common threats that for decades had prompted the two states to cooperate and find common geo-strategic interests — in spite of Iran’s transformation into an Islamist anti-Zionist state — would no longer exist.”
The Israelis, who had long ignored Iranian rhetoric, decided it needed to be taken seriously, especially in light of the Islamic state’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran worried about Israel’s growing power and wanted to assert power in the region. “Iran once had a more pragmatic leadership and policies,” says Kaye. The marginalization of the reformers that were popular in the 1990s meant that the extremist factions in the leadership became dominant. America’s invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 removed that country’s threat to Israel, leaving it with Iran as the most menacing nation in the region.
Now, Iran and Israel seem headed for war. One of those countries, or possibly the United States, will take an action that its opponent sees as requiring a military response. Assassinations of scientists and diplomats are bad enough, but a full-scale war could be the greatest disaster of the young 21stcentury, a battle between well-armed bitter enemies who once found it possible to coexist.
Jordan Michael Smith writes about U.S. foreign policy for Salon. He has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post. More Jordan Michael Smith
On Sunday, the Arab League announced that it had formally decided to “open channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and offer full political and financial support, urging (the opposition) to unify its ranks” and to “ask the UN Security Council to issue a decision on the formation of a joint UN-Arab peacekeeping force to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire.”
This is the strongest call for foreign military intervention that has yet come from the international community regarding Syria, as more and more Syrians are getting caught up in government crackdowns and increased fighting between the Syrian army and a growing armed opposition movement. Yet questions about the nature and timing of such an intervention are far more complex than in Libya.
As Rania Abouzeid put it simply in Time, “Syria is at war.” A leaked report from the Arab League’s now-defunct fact-finding mission to Syria notes that the situation is rapidly degenerating into a contest between government forces and a growing, determined guerrilla movement (simply called the “armed entity”) that formed due to “excessive use of force by Syrian Government forces, in response to protests that occurred before the deployment of the Mission demanding the fall of the regime.”
“In some zones, this armed entity reacted by attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the Government to respond with further violence,” wrote the observers. “In the end, innocent citizens pay the price for those actions with life and limb.”
This is what makes the newest argument for intervention advanced in the United States so troubling. The prospect of heavily armed militias fighting the government (and perhaps each other) is known. But for some U.S. politicians, this is acknowledged and seen as an acceptable risk. Some members of Congress are now advocating arming the anti-regime militias, suggesting that if better equipped, the militias could hold back (perhaps even defeat) Assad’s forces. The U.S., EU, Turkey, Libya and Saudi Arabia are looking for Assad’s departure (Israel’s interests are still unclear), while Russia, Lebanon and Iran appear willing to provide support for Assad. In short, the potential for proxy intervention has definitely increased since the UN failed to pass a resolution against Assad last week.
Joseph Lieberman and John McCain were the first to make such calls, and have been joined by other members of Congress in the past few days. Now a bipartisan group of senators is advancing a resolution calling for “the President to support an effective transition to democracy in Syria by identifying and providing substantial material and technical support, upon request, to Syrian organizations that are representative of the people of Syria.” It does not elaborate on who these groups are, or what constitutes material and technical support, but at the very least, it would mean financial assistance (which the militias could use to purchase arms on the black market) and intelligence dissemination, which would almost certainly result in the dispatch of military observers or advisors.
This approach is a gamble. So too are suggestions for creating no-fly zones over northern Syria, or counting on sanctions and brokerage by the Russian foreign minister to achieve a political solution. Any form of intervention or non-intervention will cost lives – lives that could have been saved, lives that might not have been lost. But of those options, the call to arm militias, or cooperate with them by providing Western funds and intelligence (which would likely be channeled through the Turks and Saudis), is more likely to become a reality since the United States could act without relying on the UN.
If this is just talk meant to encourage the opposition and scare Assad, then it runs the risk of achieving one, but not the other (and of falsely raising the hopes of the groups we’re ostensibly supporting, as happened in Iraq in 1991). If implemented, there are risks that the disbursement of arms will bring stalemate, not solution. Writes Syrian blogger Maysaloon, “we might see a drastic arming of the Free Syrian Army, and an escalation of the conflict to a fully blown civil war. If that happens I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if the Russians (and Iran) continue to arm Assad to the gills.”
“I don’t think anybody, apart from Assad, would want to see that happen,” Maysaloon believes. “Of course Assad would prefer this solution because it would justify his oppression and use of violence, and also extend the period of his rule.”
The program could actually lead to more direct foreign military intervention. Even should the militias succeed and Assad falls, nothing suggests that all of these now well-armed groups would lay down their arms. And who would secure the Syrian Army’s depots to prevent a militia from grabbing a few truckloads of munitions from an unguarded arms cache, as has happened in post-Saddam Iraq and post-Gadhafi Libya?
Additionally, the Alawites of Syria, as the Economist notes, have their own militias with access to the regime’s weapons stockpiles. Alawites and Christians are overrepresented in the officer corps, so even if many do abandon their posts, they are not likely to abandon their arms – especially given what happened next door in Iraq and Lebanon since the 1980s. They would be loath to do so; and so too would the victors fearful of an insurgency by unrepentant Baathists. It is worth remembering that the first insurgents the US faced in Iraq were ex-Iraqi army guerrilla cells, and soon Sunni and Shia communities were taking advantage of unsecured weapons to arm themselves, both in self-defense and for reasons of revenge.
Whether one supports intervention or not, past experience suggests that an international peacekeeping force would be required to secure these depots, which essentially defeats the purpose of arming the militias as an alternative to direct intervention. Such a force would also be necessary to ensure that the militias – including the pro-Assad ones – are turning in their arms and keeping to cease-fire agreements. Otherwise, Syria might end up in a scenario where many in the officer corps retain their arms, the arms depots are thrown open to everyone, and community self-defense becomes blurred with ethnosectarian revanchism.
And then there is the matter of border control, especially with respect to Lebanon and Turkey, as it’s clear that arms smugglers, refugees and militiamen are already easily moving across these borders. An enclave of militias and refugees has formed on the northern Syria-Lebanon border, and clashes between pro- and anti-Assad militias have reportedly occurred on the Lebanese side of that border.
The armed opposition is gaining, but also losing, ground throughout the country. The government’s brutal crackdowns have produced groups taking up arms to defend themselves, and also to take the fight to Assad. Paul Wood of the BBC says that the country is witnessing “an escalating guerrilla campaign” – one echoing the struggle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood between 1976 and 1982 – and that the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) claims to be planning a “general offensive” in response to the government’s siege of Homs, even though the government is closing its iron ring around the city.
Nic Robertson at CNN reports that in Homs, the epicenter of the opposition, the local opposition council “is not the only show in town. Salafists are moving in too, Islamic radicals … Reports abound of infighting both inside and outside Syria, the hard-liners already jockeying for post-al-Assad power.” Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), now allegedly operating in Syria to provoke further strife between Assad and the Syrian opposition, views Syria as a prize to be won, as do other jihadists throughout the region.
A split remains between the Syrian National Council (SNC), the most visible Syrian opposition group, and the FSA, the umbrella name for the various anti-regime militias that are now active in Syria. And while the SNC is increasingly recognized as the international voice of the opposition, it too has struggled to reach a consensus on foreign military intervention. The SNC is conspicuously absent from a “dialogue” with Assad that the Russians are trying to promote as an alternative to the UN resolutions they’ve vetoed. The SNC says it has been excluded on purpose. The Russian Foreign Ministry, for its part, has shown disdain for the SNC and a clear preference for Assad retaining power.
The Economist presents an overview of the domestic forces still supporting Assad, which shows that for the most part, “support” means acquiescence to his rule out of fear. Syria’s sectarian divides are sharpening in response to such fears of “Sunni triumphalism,” says the Economist – and Assad’s propaganda machine is playing these fault lines up. According to Patrick Seale, many poor Sunni youths were at the forefront of the nonviolent demonstrations that were suppressed. After years of limited opportunities, and in response to the government’s actions, they are now taking up arms against the regime.
As the violence mounts, pent-up grievances are coming to the fore and the unarmed majority is losing patience – but with whom, the government, or the emerging militias? No one can say for sure, or predict how more and more unarmed people in communities targeted by the government for repression (and by the opposition for liberation) will react as the violence continues. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that geopolitical maneuvering is rapidly eliminating any prospect of a “third way” that does not end in a proxy war, or a regional conflagration.
Paul Mutter is a fellow at Truthout.org, as well as a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, Mondoweiss, and The Arabist. He is currently on leave from NYU's graduate program in journalism and international affairs. More Paul Mutter
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Abu Yaman used to work at the oil refinery in Homs, where production helped Syria maintain cheap subsidized heating oil and fuel, as well as free health care and 24-hour electricity.
Today, Abu Yaman’s refinery has become a military base, its main pipelines destroyed, state hospitals stormed by secret police, electricity cut and makeshift home clinics overwhelmed with casualties as Homs endures an onslaught of rockets and mortars in the regime’s worst massacre of civilians since the uprising began 11 months ago.
With rights group Avaaz reporting at least 258 people killed — including 72 children and 42 women — in a single night of shelling just hours before Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad, analysts warn the onslaught in Syria marks a new chapter in which further bloodshed appears inevitable.
In shelling by tanks, artillery and what several sources inside Homs said were multiple rocket launchers, Syrian security forces have killed at least 350 people since late Friday, prompting the U.S. to close its embassy in Damascus and withdraw its ambassador and remaining staff.
“Its own supporters believe the regime has shown too much restraint and they have been increasingly vocal in calling for a crackdown,” Peter Harling, the Damascus-based Syria Project Director at the International Crisis Group, told GlobalPost.
“The situation in Syria is now entering a phase of extreme violence. The regime has not until now made use of all the fire power at its disposal. Now that Russia torpedoed the one political mechanism on the table, the armed struggle will take greater importance.”
An activist from Khaldiyye, the first opposition-held neighborhood of Homs to be targeted in the onslaught that began Friday around 10 p.m., gave a graphic account of an almost apocalyptic night of terror in the city that is already the hardest hit by the government crackdown.
“We are used to shelling so when it started we thought it would only last a few minutes, so everyone stayed indoors,” said Waleed Fares. “But then we heard a terrible, loud sound.”
The sound was from a local apartment block, home to 36 flats, Fares said, collapsing after being hit repeatedly by rockets and shells.
Rushing outside to help recover the injured and dead, Fares said the sound of mosques calling out “God is great” mixed with the explosion of shells and the cries of those in pain.
“There were children crying, women screaming, standing in their nightclothes because they had not had time to dress,” Fares said.
“We took the bodies and the injured to a nearby park. I counted around 40 bodies from the building collapse. The injuries were appalling: People missing limbs; people crushed so badly you couldn’t recognize them; people pierced by metal.”
Even in the park, terrified residents said they were not safe. “Three bombs fell on the park and killed around 30 people,” Fares said, one of them his friend, Omar Zarour, who was also trying to rescue trapped neighbors.
Omar Shakir, an activist in Bab Amr, another Sunni-majority neighborhood in Homs, said the shelling was like, “random machine gun fire, only much, much heavier.”
“The bombs fell like rain,” said Shakir, whose best friend, 23-year-old Madher Tayyara, a student turned volunteer medic died on Friday at home from shrapnel in his chest and head. “You didn’t know where they would fall. You can only pray.”
Several hospitals treating the dead and dying were raided by security forces, according to reporting from activists in Homs gathered by Avaaz, which described the humanitarian situation inside the city as appalling.
Small field hospitals set up to treat protesters were suddenly overwhelmed with hundreds of injured, according to activists. With security forces laying siege to neighborhoods and preventing medical supplies from reaching the area, activists feared many of the up to 1,000 people injured would die because there was no way to treat them.
One of the hospitals targeted was the Hikmat in Homs’ Inshaat neighborhood, where a video uploaded to YouTube yesterday appeared to show a doctor walking through a hospital whose roof was leaking and and bloodstains on the floor.
“Fifth of February, the Hikmat hospital,” says the voice on the video. “The surgery room was hit by shells. Here is one injured person,” he says, lifting covers to reveal a man unconscious from anesthetic, apparently left mid operation.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), medical staff and patients were gunned down when two field hospitals were targeted by Syrian forces Monday in Bab Amr, leaving three patients killed and a doctor needing an amputation.
“The hospitals were specifically targeted,” SOHR spokesman, Sami Ibrahim, told GlobalPost from close by Bab Amr.
“It’s a disastrous situation. People are losing their minds. When the bombing ceases we can hear them crying out for help.”
Interviewed by a GlobalPost reporter in Damascus on the day he fled with his family from Homs, Abu Yaman said his neighborhood of Inshaat had come under heavy fire, with no phone or mobile coverage for 11 days and no electricity and water for a week.
“We cannot walk in the streets so we made holes in the walls between each flat to reach a small shop at the end of the block open every day for just two hours,” he said.
“We are 10 families in the building and we all moved to the basement flat to use it like a shelter: 10 families living in a 150 square meter space underground.”
Abu Yaman said residents had begun to burn tables, chairs and other household wood to try and stay warm through winter nights without heating oil or electricity and that corpses were being buried in private gardens because graveyards were either full or impossible to access.
“My two children haven’t slept well for months,” he said. “My wife was pregnant but she lost the baby after she was shocked by a bomb hitting our building. No one in the world can imagine what Assad’s forces are doing in Homs since Friday.”
The Assad regime denied the assault on Homs, with state-run Syria TV claiming corpses shown in video footage — said by activists to be victims of the bombardment — had been people kidnapped and killed by “terrorist armed groups.”
The assault with heavy weapons initially appeared to have been triggered by the capture of more than a dozen soldiers by members of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), which attacked a checkpoint and an airbase on Friday.
In a video released on YouTube and broadcast by Arab satellite channels, a man identifying himself as from the Farouq Battalion of the FSA is heard taunting the captured soldiers.
“How did we capture you and you have everything, arms and ammunition, at this checkpoint?” he asks. “If we had captured women it would have been more difficult. It did not even take us 10 minutes to capture you.”
The taunting takes a sectarian turn when each man is forced to admit he is from the minority Allawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam from which the Assad family and much of the regime and loyalist security forces are drawn. Around three quarters of Syria’s population, and the overwhelming majority of the opposition, including the FSA, are Sunni Muslims.
A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army told GlobalPost the armed rebels had lost 27 soldiers in four days of fighting with Assad’s troops up to Friday, saying the regime had planned an assault on Homs before the capture and video of its soldiers.
“The regime is a killing machine. Four days ago the regime said it would finish the revolution but the revolution will not end,” said the FSA commander, known as Abu Ali. “We capture soldiers to show how weak the regime is. Their soldiers fight for one person, Bashar al-Assad. We fight for a cause: the nation.”
In interviews with half a dozen different residents and activists in Homs since Friday, it appeared the majority of Assad’s forces remain, for now, deployed around restive neighbourhoods, while heavy artillery and rockets pound the city from afar.
The fear of many though, is that a full scale ground assault is imminent, with dark memories of the massacre of up to 30,000 civilians in Hama after that nearby Sunni-majority city rose up three decades ago to challenge Assad’s father, Hafez.
“The Assad regime wants to finish us,” Abu Yaman said. “We fear the president wants to make Homs another Hama. We are living in a very hard situation and we need help from the world.”
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