Saturday, June 9, 2012

World

Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Updated: June 8, 2012

The wave of Arab unrest that began with the Tunisian revolution reached Syria on March 15, 2011, when residents of a small southern city took to the streets to protest the torture of students who had put up anti-government graffiti. The government responded with heavy-handed force, and demonstrations quickly spread across much of the country.

President Bashar al-Assad, a British-trained doctor who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, Hafez al-Assad, at first wavered between force and hints of reform. But in April 2011, just days after lifting the country’s decades-old state of emergency, he set off the first of what became a series of withering crackdowns, sending tanks into restive cities as security forces opened fire on demonstrators.

Neither the violence nor Mr. Assad’s offers of political reform — rejected as shams by protest leaders — brought an end to the unrest. Similarly, the protesters have not been able to overcome direct assault by the military’s armed forces or to seize and hold significant chunks of territory.

In the summer of 2011, as the crackdown dragged on, thousands of soldiers defected and began launching attacks against the government, bringing the country to what the United Nations in December called the verge of civil war.  An opposition government in exile was formed, the Syrian National Council, but the council’s internal divisions have kept Western and Arab governments from recognizing it as such. The opposition remains a fractious collection of political groups, longtime exiles, grass-roots organizers and armed militants, divided along ideological, ethnic or sectarian lines.

The conflict is complicated by Syria’s ethnic divisions. The Assads and much of the nation’s elite, especially the military, belong to the Alawite sect, a minority in a mostly Sunni country. While the Assad government has the advantage of crushing firepower and units of loyal, elite troops, the insurgents should not be underestimated. They are highly motivated and, over time, demographics should tip in their favor. Alawites constitute about 12 percent of the 23 million Syrians. Sunni Muslims, the opposition’s backbone, make up about 75 percent of the population.

Sectarian Civil War Looms

The United States and countries around the world have condemned President Assad, who many had hoped would soften his father’s iron-handed regime. Criticism has also come from unlikely quarters, like Syria’s neighbors, Jordan and Turkey, and the Arab League. Syria was expelled from the Arab League after it agreed to a peace plan only to step up attacks on protesters. In late 2011 and early 2012, Syria agreed to allow league observers into the country. But their presence did nothing to slow the violence.

In February 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to approve a resolution condemning President Assad’s unbridled crackdown on the uprising, but China and Russia, Syria’s traditional patron, blocked all efforts for stronger Security Council action.

Emboldened by faltering diplomacy and Russia’s pledge to keep supplying weapons, the Assad government in March launched bloody assaults on insurgent strongholds, driving rebels from the cities of Homs and Idlib. According to estimates from the United Nations, the conflict has left more than 10,000 dead, thousands more displaced and as many as 40,000 people may have been detained. The Red Crescent said in May 2012 that as many as 1.5 million people needed help getting food, water or shelter.

The country appeared to be unraveling in what looks like a sectarian civil war. Sunni Muslims who have fled the country described a government crackdown that is more pervasive and more sectarian than previously understood, with civilians affiliated with Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect shooting at their onetime neighbors as the military presses what many Sunnis see as a campaign to force them to flee their homes and villages.

Locked in an Ominous Stalemate

With overwhelming firepower and a willingness to kill, Mr. Assad appears to believe that his strategy is succeeding. But analysts say sheer force alone is unlikely to eradicate what has become a diffuse and unpredictable insurgency, one able to strike out even after the government has used crushing force. Broad areas of the country are hostile territory for government troops, and attackers have managed to hit centers of power, even in the capital, Damascus.

The conflict has become a war of attrition that grows more dangerous as it goes along. Tensions have spilled over borders into Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan and raised fears that radical Islamic militants will find a new cause for recruitment.

In early April, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general now acting as a special envoy, reported that the Assad government had agreed to a six-point peace plan, which laid out a framework for a cease-fire that does not involve the president leaving power. Syria agreed, but only a week after the plan was put into effect, Ban-ki Moon, the current secretary general of the United Nations, said that Syria had failed to implement almost every aspect of the peace plan. Still, without a better alternative, the United Nations proposed sending 300 cease-fire observers to Syria.

In late May, international efforts to pressure Syria intensified in the wake of a massacre that left at least 108 villagers dead in central Syria, most of them women or children. Several Western countries moved to expel Syrian ambassadors from their soil, steps that followed comments by the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff warning that continued atrocities could make military intervention more likely.

Mr. Obama was pressing Russia to support a peaceful ouster of Mr. Assad along the lines of the transition brokered in Yemen. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized Mr. Obama for not taking stronger measures, but his party appeared split. Military officials said they had made plans for intervention, but there was little enthusiasm at either the Pentagon or the White House for the use of force or the arming of rebels without international support and a clearer idea of an end game.

Protest Timeline

June 8 Confronting a scene of congealed blood, scattered body parts, shelled buildings, bullet holes and the smell of burned flesh, United Nations monitors in Syria collected evidence of a mass atrocity in the desolate hamlet of Qubeir, more than 24 hours after Syrian forces and government supporters had blocked their first attempt to visit the site. The monitoring team’s journey to Qubeir, filmed and posted online, presented the outside world with the first visual proof from a neutral official source that a horrific crime had occurred there.

June 7 Syrian government troops and their civilian supporters blocked unarmed United Nations monitors from investigating a massacre of farm families in the tiny hamlet of Qubeir, just west of Hama. Activists said that as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, had been shot, garroted and in some cases burned alive. The monitors themselves were fired upon, United Nations officials said.

June 6 President Bashar al-Assad reorganized his government, appointing the agriculture minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, as prime minister. In Washington, representatives from more than 55 countries pressing for the resignation of Mr. Assad threatened to dramatically expand their financial pressure on his government, while Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested that the use of military force was a possibility.

June 5 Syria’s Foreign Ministry said that more than a dozen Western ambassadors and envoys were no longer welcome, a response to the coordinated expulsion on May 29 of Syrian diplomats from the United States and 10 other nations. But Syria’s tough words on the diplomats appeared to be tempered by an agreement to allow international relief agencies to increase their presence and deliver aid to an estimated one million people from field offices in four cities — Dara’a, Homs, Idlib and Deir al-Zour.

June 4 The Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper warned against Western military intervention in Syria, in a strongly worded reminder that China, like Russia, is wary of forceful international action even as the civil conflict in Syria grows much bloodier. China and Russia, both members of the United Nations Security Council, have long opposed Western military intervention. The recent comments came as Arab and Western governments appeared to be considering a more muscular response to the carnage in Syria.

June 3 President Bashar al-Assad denied that the Syrian government played a role in the massacre in the village of Houla, using his first speech in five months to reiterate his line that foreigners were fomenting the violence in Syria. The May 25 attack at the village left 108 people dead, 49 of them children. The United Nations found indications the attack was carried out by the the shabiha, armed militiamen controlled by the government.

June 1 Members of the United Nations Human Rights Council called for an international inquiry into the massacre of more than 100 Syrian civilians at Houla, challenging the assertion by Syrian authorities that it was the work of opposition gunmen. The meetings coincided with activist descriptions of 11 factory workers executed in the town of Qusair, the third mass killing reported in a week.

May 31 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that every day of slaughter in Syria is strengthening the case for tougher international action, yet stressed that military intervention would require support from the world community and Russia. Other obstacles include the Syrian opposition’s lack of unity and the strength of Syria’s professional military and air defenses.

May 30 United Nations cease-fire monitors reported a new atrocity, saying 13 people had been discovered shot to death execution-style in eastern Syria, with hands bound behind their backs. Antigovernment activists said the victims, from the Assukar area of Deir Ezzor Province, were electricity workers who had refused to end a protest strike. News of the executions came as the deputy to United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan told the Security Council in a private briefing that the uprising was unlikely to stop without political negotiations.

May 29 An effort by countries including Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, Italy and Canada to expel the senior Syrian officials appeared coordinated to deliver a strong diplomatic blow and underscore the extreme isolation of the Syrian government. In a meeting with President AssadUnited Nations special envoy Kofi Annan said he warned him that Syria was at a “tipping point” in the uprising, dismissed Mr. Assad’s contention that outsiders were responsible for the bloodshed and appealed to him to enforce the cease-fire plan.

May 28 United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan began a new round of negotiations in the capital, Damascus, and the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that continued atrocities could make military intervention more likely.

May 26 More than 90 people, including at least 32 children under the age of 10, were killed in a central Syrian village, top United Nations officials said, accusing the government of perpetrating the “indiscriminate” shelling of civilian neighborhoods.

 

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Background to Protests

The country’s last serious stirrings of public discontent had come in 1982, when increasingly violent skirmishes with the Muslim Brotherhood prompted Hafez al-Assad to move against them, sending troops to kill at least 10,000 people and smashing the old city of Hama. Hundreds of fundamentalist leaders were jailed, many never seen alive again.

Syria has a liability not found in the successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — it is a majority Sunni nation that is ruled by a religious minority, the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam. Hafez Assad forged his power base through fear, cooption and sect loyalty. He built an alliance with an elite Sunni business community, and created multiple security services staffed primarily by Alawites. Those security forces have a great deal to lose if the government falls, experts said, because they are part of a widely despised minority, and so have the incentive of self-preservation.

In July 2011, the Obama administration, in a shift that was weeks in the making, turned against Mr. Assad but stopped short of demanding that he step down. By early August, the American ambassador was talking of a “post-Assad” Syria.

In October, Syrian dissidents formally established the Syrian National Council in what seemed to be the most serious attempt to bring together a fragmented opposition. The group’s stated goal was to overthrow President Assad’s government. Members said the council included representatives from the Damascus Declaration group, a pro-democracy network; the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamic political party; various Kurdish factions; the Local Coordination Committees, a group that helps organize and document protests; and other independent and tribal figures.

In the U.S.: Different Views on Intervention

The Obama administration has made a point of working through the Arab League and the United Nations rather than giving the appearance that the United States is trying to intervene in Syria. This is partly to avoid giving Iran any excuse to get involved on behalf of its regional ally, analysts say.

However, some politicians favor more direct intervention. On Feb. 19, two senior American senators spoke out strongly in favor of arming the Syrian opposition forces.

The senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, laid out a series of diplomatic, humanitarian and military aid proposals that would put the United States squarely behind the effort to topple President Assad. Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham, both of whom are on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that rebel fighters deserved to be armed and that helping them take on the Syrian government would aid Washington’s effort to weaken Iran.

The next day, two Iranian warships docked in the Syrian port of Tartous as a senior Iranian lawmaker denounced the possibility that the Americans might arm the Syrian opposition. Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency called the ships “a serious warning” to the United States.

“The presence of Iran and Russia’s flotillas along the Syrian coast has a clear message against the United States’ possible adventurism,” said Hossein Ebrahimi, a vice chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, Fars reported.

Syria relies on Iran for financial and military support, and the governments in Damascus and Tehran have sectarian ties as well: Iran has strongly backed the Syrian Shiite minority and the offshoot Alawite sect that makes up Syria’s ruling class.

Arms Anchor the Relationship With Russia

As the violence has worsened throughout Syria, amateur video has shown government troops rolling through the besieged city of Homs in vintage Soviet battle tanks. Seemingly undeterred by an international outcry, Moscow has worked frantically to preserve its relationship with the increasingly isolated government of Mr. Assad, even as the Syrian leader turns his guns on his own citizens, and the death toll mounts.

Russia has praised Mr. Assad’s call for a constitutional referendum, a step that the United States and other governments have dismissed as meaningless. On Feb. 16, 2012, Russia was one of just a dozen countries, among them China, Iran and North Korea, to vote against a General Assembly resolution urging Mr. Assad to step down.

And many analysts say that without Russia’s backing, including a steady supply of weapons, food, medical supplies and other aid, the Assad government will crumble within a matter of months if not sooner.

While Moscow has a number of reasons to guard its relations with Damascus, the most concrete, many analysts say, is the longstanding arms sales to Syria. Arms exports have long anchored the relationship between Moscow and Damascus, including sales over the years of MIG fighter jets, attack helicopters and high-tech air defense systems.

While the ouster and death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and the imposition of sanctions on Iran have sharply curtailed other formerly lucrative arms markets for Russia, Syria has increased its weapons purchases.

Regional political events have also played a part. The Arab Spring and the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dissipated Russia’s once-powerful influence in the region, transforming the relationship into one of critical importance to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who is running for president and wants to expand Russia’s role as a global powerbroker.

Conflict in Syria Poses Risk of a Wider Strife

For decades, Syria was the linchpin of the old security order in the Middle East. It allowed the Russians and Iranians to extend their influence even as successive Assad governments provided predictability for Washington and a stable border for Israel, despite support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

But the burgeoning civil war in Syria has upset that paradigm, placing the Russians and Americans and their respective allies on opposite sides. It is a conflict that has sharply escalated sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis and between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf nations. And it has left Israel hopeful that an enemy will fall, but deeply concerned about who might take control of his arsenal.

Washington is keenly aware of the larger forces at play and of the dangers of another military intervention in an Arab country.

For Russia, the fall of Mr. Assad, an ally and arms customer, would further diminish its influence in the region. If Mr. Assad goes, any new government will note Russia’s support for him, including a steady supply of weapons. Arabs across the region, who are demanding their rights and freedoms, may resent it, too.

For the United States, the conflict is a bundle of risks and contradictions that has made Washington’s stance — frustrating those who favor a more robust intervention — far more cautious than it was in Libya.

For Washington, Europe and the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the gulf, the impact on Iran is as important as the fate of Mr. Assad. Syria is one of Iran’s closest allies. It was nearly alone in supporting Iran, not Iraq, in their war in the 1980s. Syria has been Iran’s main conduit to supply aid and weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The United States and Europe — with tenuous Russian and Chinese support — have isolated Iran economically and diplomatically to try to forestall Tehran from being able to build a nuclear weapon. The conflict in Syria complicates that delicate diplomacy, but a new Syrian government could be a greater blow to Iranian influence than any sanction the West has mustered so far. It could also revive democratic protests in Iran.

But the administration is ruling out direct military intervention in this conflict. After a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a limited intervention in Libya that was harshly criticized by Republicans, President Obama wants no new military adventure in an election year. Nor does the Pentagon, especially given Syria’s integrated air defense system, supplied by Russia.

Not least, American officials point out the murky nature and incoherence of the armed opposition to Mr. Assad and note that the Free Syrian Army, formed by exiled Syrian Army officers, defectors and militias, does not control significant territory in Syria where arms could be supplied.

Aggravating Regional Sectarian Tensions

The insurrection in Syria, led by the country’s Sunni majority in opposition to a government dominated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism, is increasingly unpredictable and dangerous because it is aggravating sectarian tensions beyond its borders in a region already shaken by religious and ethnic divisions.

For many in the region, the fight in Syria is less about liberating a people under dictatorship than it is about power and self-interest. Syria is drawing in sectarian forces from its neighbors, and threatening to spill its conflict into a wider conflagration. There have already been sparks in neighboring Lebanon, where Sunnis and Alawites have skirmished.

And in Iraq, where Shiites are a majority, the events across the border have put the nation on edge while hardening a sectarian schism. Iraq’s Shiites are now lined up on the side of a Baathist dictatorship in Syria, less than a decade after the American invasion of Iraq toppled the rule of Saddam Hussein and his own Baath Party, which for decades had repressed and brutalized the Shiites.

The paradox, of Shiites supporting a Baathist dictator next door, has laid bare a tenet of the old power structure that for so long helped preserve the Middle East’s strongmen. Minorities often remained loyal and pliant and in exchange were given room to carve out communities, even if they were more broadly discriminated against.

As dictators have fallen in neighboring countries, religious and ethnic identities and alliances have only hardened, while notions of citizenship remain slow to take hold.

Syria’s minorities have the example of Iraq in considering their own future, should the Assad government fall: Assyrian Christians, Yazidis and others were brutally persecuted by insurgents. In Egypt, where a similar paradigm was toppled with the long-serving dictator Hosni Mubarak, Christians have experienced more sectarian violence, increasing political marginalization and a growing link between Islamic identity and citizenship.

New Constitution Approved As Troops Pursue Rebels

On Feb. 27, 2012, the Syrian government announced that nearly 90 percent of voters in a referendum had approved a new Constitution. But Western leaders labeled the referendum a farce. In a bulletin across the bottom of the screen on state television, the ministry said 89 percent of the voters, or nearly 7.5 million of the 8.4 million people who cast ballots, had voted in favor of the Constitution — an offer of reform that critics dismissed as too little, too late.

The new Constitution’s most important changes include ending the political monopoly of the Baath Party and introducing presidential term limits.

Those changes come with enormous caveats, however. The president would be limited to two terms of seven years each, but the clock would start only when Mr. Assad’s current term expires in 2014. That would allow him to serve two more terms and potentially to remain in office until he is 62, a total of 28 years. His father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled for 30 years until his death in 2000 at age 69.

The document also includes provisions that appear to be intended to prevent the political opposition from entering politics or winning the presidency. It requires candidates to have lived in Syria for 10 successive years and to have a Syrian-born wife, and it prohibits parties that are based on religion or ethnicity, which would bar groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or representatives of the Kurdish minority from participating.

Before the Revolt: Syria’s Foreign Policy

Under the administration of President George W. Bush, Syria was once again vilified as a dangerous pariah. It was linked to the 2005 killing of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. In 2007, Israeli jets destroyed buildings in Syria that intelligence officials said might have been the first stage in a nuclear weapons program. And the United States and its Arab allies mounted a vigorous campaign to isolate Damascus, which they accused of sowing chaos and violence throughout the Middle East through its support for militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.

President Obama came into office pledging to engage with Syria, arguing that the Bush administration’s efforts to isolate Syria had done nothing to wean it from Iran or encourage Middle East peace efforts. So far, however, the engagement has been limited. American diplomats have visited Damascus, but have reiterated the same priorities as the Bush administration: protesting Syria’s military support to Hezbollah and Hamas, and its strong ties with Iran.

Secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations show that arms transactions involving Syria and Hezbollah continue to be of concern to the Obama administration. Hezbollah’s arsenal includes up to 50,000 rockets and missiles, including some 40 to 50 Fateh-110 missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and most of Israel, and 10 Scud-D missiles.

“Syria’s determined support of Hizballah’s military build-up, particularly the steady supply of longer-range rockets and the introduction of guided missiles could change the military balance and produce a scenario significantly more destructive than the July-August 2006 war,” said a November 2009 cable from the American chargé d’affaires in Damascus.

According to cables, Syrian leaders believed that the weapons shipments increased their political leverage with the Israelis. But they made Lebanon even more of a tinderbox and increased the prospect that a future conflict might include Syria.

The Hariri Case

In August 2011, the United Nations-backed international tribunal investigating the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, released the full indictment against the members of Hezbollah named in the killing.

The United States withdrew its ambassador in 2005 after Mr. Hariri was killed in a car bombing in Beirut along with 22 others. Syria was widely accused of having orchestrated the killing, though it denied involvement. The Bush administration imposed economic sanctions on Syria, as part of a broader effort to isolate the government of Mr. Assad.

Turkish Opposition to Assad

Once one of Syria’s closest allies, Turkey is hosting an armed opposition group waging an insurgency against the government of President Assad, providing shelter to the commander and dozens of members of the group, the Free Syrian Army, and allowing them to orchestrate attacks across the border from inside a camp guarded by the Turkish military.

The group is too small to pose any real challenge to Mr. Assad’s government, but support from Turkey underlines how combustible, and resilient, Syria’s uprising has proven. The country sits at the intersection of influences in the region — with Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Israel — and Turkey’s involvement is being closely watched by Syria’s friends and foes.

Turkish officials said that their government has not provided weapons or military support to the insurgent group, nor has the group directly requested such assistance.

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