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Besieged Homs Areas Endure Heavy Bombardment

October 8, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

AJ Correspondents

DOHA, Qatar, Oct 08 (IPS) – Syria’s military has intensified its shelling of rebel-held areas of the city Homs, activists say, amid reports of aerial and ground bombardment elsewhere in the country.Heavy clashes were reported between government forces and opposition fighters in Homs’ al-Khalidiyeh neighbourhood, as videos posted online appeared to show barrels of TNT explosives being dropped on the besieged areas.

Opposition strongholds in Homs have been under siege for at least 120 days, with humanitarian conditions continuing to deteriorate.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Raji Rahmet Rabou, an activist in Homs, said: "The siege is a huge problem for us. We are dying every day but nobody is paying attention to us.

"The last two days have been especially intense as the shelling did not stop whatsoever."

The northern province of Aleppo, eastern Deir Ezzor province and northwestern Idlib province also witnessed clashes between President Bashar al-Assad’s troops and opposition fighters on Monday, activists reported.

In the southern province of Deraa, 20 people were reported killed in Karak al-Sharqi, including at least five rebel fighters, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The observatory reported that some of the deaths came as troops blasted cars ferrying wounded people to field hospitals and clinics for treatment.

"Karak al-Sharqi has suffered repeated military assaults, heavy shelling and attempts to storm it over the past three days," said the observatory, which collates its information from a network of activists and medics on the ground.

It added that the town was facing "a crippling blockade and terrible medical and humanitarian conditions".

Monday’s reported pre-dawn barrages came hours after a bomb exploded late on Sunday in a vehicle in the car park of the police headquarters in central Damascus, killing a policeman and damaging the building, state news agency SANA said.

Witnesses said that the blast was followed by heavy gunfire, while the observatory said "one or two people" were killed in the latest in a string of bombings of high-level security targets in the capital.

The latest reports of the violence in the country came as U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned of "dangerous fallout from spiralling violence along the Syrian-Turkish border".

"The escalation of the conflict along the Syrian-Turkish border and the impact of the crisis on Lebanon are extremely dangerous," Ban said at the opening of the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France.

The armed uprising has increasingly sparked violence on Syria’s border with NATO member Turkey, with the Turkish military returning fire on Sunday after a shell launched from Syria struck the border village of Akcakale.

There were no casualties in Sunday’s incident, but last Wednesday five civilians were killed in the village following shelling from Syria.

‘Abandon use of violence’

Since Wednesday, the Turkish military has responded in kind whenever Syrian ordnance has breached its territory, inflaming tensions between the former allies and leading to fears of a broader conflict.

Turkey’s parliament on Thursday gave the government the green light to use military force against Syria if necessary.

The U.N. Security Council has strongly condemned cross-border attacks by Syria and called for restraint between the two neighbours whose relations have nosedived since the conflict began last year, with Ankara supporting the rebel fighters.

Shelling from Syria into Lebanon and cross-border shootings have become regular occurrences, while residents of Lebanon’s frontier region accuse Syria’s army of carrying out frequent incursions and kidnapping refugees.

The U.N. chief also raised concerns about arms supplies to both Assad’s regime and rebel forces.

"I am deeply concerned by the continued flow of arms to both the Syrian government and opposition forces. I urge again those countries providing arms to stop doing so," he said.

"Militarisation only aggravates the situation. I am calling on all concerned to abandon the use of violence, and move toward a political solution. That is the only way out of the crisis."

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Conflict, Mideast, Report Tagged With:

World Forgetting Palestinian Rights

October 8, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Pierre Klochendler

JERUSALEM, Oct 07 (IPS) – The annual debate has just wrapped up and, already, the certainty is that if last year Palestinian statehood auspiciously dominated the international agenda, this time, the issue vanished from the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and will vanish even further from world affairs.When Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas looked down on the General Assembly plenum a fortnight ago, though the hall was packed, he probably felt lonely. He knew his would be the sole address devoted to the cause of an independent Palestinian state in peace alongside Israel.

For the umpteenth time, Abbas depicted how Israel’s settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territories renders year by year a two-state solution to the conflict more unattainable – to no avail.

His speech was similar in essence to the one he’d delivered exactly one year ago at the same place – except that this time, his bid was limited to gaining non-member state status, not full statehood recognition at the U.N. Security Council.

Abbas’s statehood bid was shelved as soon as it was introduced. The U.S. and its Western allies had pressed the Security Council and the General Assembly not to proceed with the largely symbolic vote.

Then, prodded by the U.S., the reason advanced by the Security Council powers was that peace moves with Israel, not a unilateral move, had to be given another chance. As consolation price, a month later, Palestine gained UNESCO membership.

A year on, what Abbas drew from the General Assembly was the kind of almost casually apologetic words of recognition and appraisal that the Palestinian issue garners at every global forum.

The General Assembly was the first and leading power supporting a two-state solution. In November 1947, it voted the Partition Plan between a Jewish state and an Arab state in Mandatory Palestine.

But ever since the historic General Assembly vote, quasi-universal, though insipid, pledges and rubberstamp commitments to Palestinian statehood have been dutifully distilled by UN member states.

In his address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu simply ignored his predecessor.

Surely, he submitted to the ritual. “We have to (…) negotiate together, and reach a mutual compromise,” he urged emphatically.

But he allocated two minutes of his speech to the Palestinian question at best, demonstrating thereby (if anyone needed such demonstration) that literally, wording an ironclad resolution on the future of Palestine will remain punctuated by a big question mark.

Netanyahu had heard U.S. President Barack Obama’s address. Albeit the usual hymn – or was it a eulogy? – to the bygone dream of a negotiated two-state solution which was wrapped in a single paragraph, Obama didn’t conceal the fact that, right now, diplomacy is urgently needed – but not between Israel and Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

So, Netanyahu dedicated his address to calling for a “red line” on Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme – this, in order to “prevent war”.

With noises of war against Iran permeating the General Assembly debates (though Obama had earlier pledged “to block out any noise that’s out there”), no wonder that the only recipe to the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate consisted of rueful expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians’ predicament.

There were times, not that long ago, when the Israel-Palestine conflict was the centre of gravity in international affairs.

Last winter, three rounds of exploratory talks in Amman in Jordan, between Israeli and Palestinian delegates failed to bring any result.

Palestine has sunk into oblivion, orbiting around an Israeli-imposed sphere of “conflict management” rather than gravitating toward U.S.-led “conflict resolution”. A “low-intensity conflict”, it’s therefore been relegated to the backburner of world concerns.

The dubious ‘Headline News’ mantra, “when it bleeds, it leads”, has diverted public attention from the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Far more blood is spilled in other fracture lines of the area – between Shias and Sunnis, between liberals and Islamists, between Arab dictatorships and their pro-democracy citizenry, between Jihadist and all the mentioned-above parties.

The truth is, if one compares it with the upheavals convoluting the Arab Muslim world – in Syria notably, but also elsewhere in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region – the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t appear that malignant.

And, far more blood would be spilled were Iran’s nuclear programme be tackled belligerently.

And yet, without renewed focus on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the U.S. and its Western allies (including Israel) will have a hard time convincing Arab leaders, Russia and China – themselves extremely perturbed by Iran’s nuclear programme – that a unified and more muscular approach must be adopted.

Were it to prod Israelis and Palestinians to re-engage in negotiations, the U.S. could perhaps sway public opinion, absorbed by a deep pro-Palestinian sentiment from the anti-U.S. feelings of humiliation pervading many Arab countries, as last month’s violent assaults on U.S. legations in Libya and Egypt again exposed.

That, in turn, could persuade Arab allies, as well as Russia and China, to adhere to increased pressure on Iran. But such U.S. endeavour will have to wait for a new president.

Moreover, Netanyahu’s “red line” argument would probably be more convincing were he to draw a line on his own policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, policies which traditionally elicit worldwide censure.

But why would he, for instance, be prodded to introduce a moratorium on settlement construction similar to the 10-month freeze he reluctantly agreed to impose in 2010?

After all, didn’t he implicitly agree at the U.N. that until next year’s spring or summer, Israel would allow diplomacy and sanctions to run their course. Netanyahu predicted that only by then Tehran would complete the threshold stage of its uranium enrichment.

Besides, he might be inclined to call for Israeli elections in February.

Red lines, deadlines, are like all lines: politicians like Netanyahu are seasoned enough in the art of ‘tight-roping’ a thin line. His is between war with Iran and peace with Palestine. He could still walk both. But as long as Iran’s and Syria’s leaders walk their own fine line, why should he? And so, the Israel-Palestine conflict will remain on the sidelines, in limbo.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Commentary, Mideast, Politics, Rights Tagged With:

Shadow Fighting Erupts over Gaddafi

October 8, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Mel Frykberg

CAIRO, Oct 06 (IPS) – Civilians in the town of Bani Walid, 170 km south-east of Tripoli, are facing a humanitarian crisis as Libyan security forces lay siege to the stronghold of Muammar Gaddafi supporters, cutting off water, food and medical supplies.Local doctors told Amnesty International that on Oct. 4, three vehicles carrying medical supplies, oxygen, and medical personnel were prevented from reaching the city by a group of armed men, who set up a checkpoint on the main road from capital Tripoli.

Residents said that vehicles carrying petrol, water and food supplies from the capital had also been turned back at the same checkpoint in the previous four days.

“These people have given Libya a lot of problems and the town has been infiltrated by foreign elements, but this will come to an end soon when our men move in,” Khaled Hamsha, a member of the Supreme Security Committee (SSC), an amalgamation of Libyan security forces and militias, told IPS.

The military build-up follows the death of Omran Shabaan, a militia member from Misrata town 150km east of Tripoli, who helped capture Gaddafi last year in October. Shabaan died in a Paris hospital some weeks ago shortly after his release after being captured by Gaddafi loyalists in Bani Walid in July.

His death was allegedly the result of torture and a gunshot wound he sustained during his capture. He was detained when he and several collegues were sent to Bani Walid to help secure the release of some Misratan journalists who had also been captured by Gaddafi supporters.

There is concern now over excesses on the part of militia men. “It is worrying that what essentially should be a law enforcement operation to arrest suspects looks increasingly like a siege of a city and a military operation,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

“Libyan authorities should ensure that maximum restraint is exercised in any use of force, which should be proportionate to the purported objective of arresting suspects. Movement to and from Bani Walid should not be arbitrarily constrained, and in particular all medical and other essential

supplies should be allowed to reach the city without any impediments,” Sahraoui added.

The bad blood between Misrata and Bani Walid goes back to the revolution when people from the two towns fought on different sides. Misratans fought to overthrow Gaddafi’s regime and fought against Bani Walid loyalists to Gaddafi.

Following the kidnapping of a number of Misratans in Bani Walid, which Bani Walid loyalists say is in retaliation for the abduction of hundreds of men from their town, a number of bloody confrontations between the two cities were narrowly averted at the last minute following high-level government intervention.

But following Shabaan’s death, Libya’s President of the General National Congress (GNC) Muhammad Magarief vowed that those responsible for the Misratan revolutionary’s death would be captured and brought to justice. He added that if Bani Walid officials failed to hand the men responsible over, military force would be employed against the town.

More than a thousand soldiers from revolutionary brigades from across Libya, heavily supported by Misratan brigades, have joined the National Army at four camps surrounding the Gaddafi stronghold with commanders preparing for a military assault. Residents of the besieged city are begging for international intervention.

A petition was circulated around the city last week asking the U.N. Security Council to convene an emergency meeting and intervene immediately to protect the civilians in the town.

According to The Libya Herald the petitioners claimed that pro-government armed militias were trying to indiscriminately kill large numbers of people in Bani Walid, because of the city’s history in support of Gaddafi. They reported bombing on civilian neighbourhoods on Oct. 1 with no regard to the lives of unarmed civilians.

However, many in Bani Walid remain defiant and have warned that they would fight to the last man. Last Friday large numbers of protestors rallied against the Libyan government’s demands that the men responsible for Shabaan’s death be handed over. They also called for the release of hundreds of Bani Walid residents held without trial in detention centres in Misrata.

Amnesty International says many continue to be detained without being charged or put on trial across Libya, and have been tortured or otherwise ill-treated.

The International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS) says Libya holds the highest number of prisoners held without trial in the world at nearly 89 percent. Foreign prisoners, many of them from sub-Saharan Africa, account for nearly 15 percent of Libya’s prison population, and women for just over 2 percent.

Nasseer Al Hammary, a researcher with the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights said that the human rights situation in Libya now was far worse than under Gaddafi.

“The abuse and mistreatment of prisoners in detention centres around the country, many of them run by militias, is an ongoing problem. At a conservative guess, more than twenty people, have died from abuse since the end of the revolution with many others tortured and beaten,”Al Hammary told IPS.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Mideast, News, Politics, Security Tagged With: , ,

As Conflict Spreads, Syrian Opposition Preps for the Future

October 5, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Samer Araabi

WASHINGTON, Oct 05 (IPS) – As the uprising in Syria becomes violently entangled with its neighbours, the expatriate opposition leadership is already formulating plans for a political transition following the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.On Thursday, the United States Institute of Peace hosted an event entitled "Syria After Assad: Managing the Challenges of Transition", at which panellists from USIP’s The Day After Project presented their transitional framework for a post-Assad Syria.

The panellists insisted that The Day After Project: Supporting a Democratic Transition in Syria is an "evolving, growing document" that is meant to provide guiding principles instead of concrete policy recommendations. The report covers a wide range of transitional issues including the rule of law, transitional justice, security sector reform, Constitutional design, economic and social reconstruction, and electoral reform.

The Day After Project is comprised of 45 members of the Syrian opposition, drawn from the ranks of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the Local Coordination Committees, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and other independent and unaffiliated groups. It includes several individuals who have become well known in Washington circles, such as Murhaf Jouejati, Najib Ghadbian, Radwan Ziadeh and Rami Nakhla, but only a few of the opposition leaders in Syria itself.

In an attempt to foster consensus across varied political perspectives and avoid policy decisions that fall within the jurisdiction of future governments, the report avoids specific policy prescriptions. Instead, it recommends objectives such as "judicial independence", "respect for the…diversity of Syrian society", and "measures to facilitate macroeconomic stability" without addressing the formal structures or ideologies underpinning these principles.

Nevertheless, the authors of the report have incorporated a number of lessons from recent political transitions in the region. They stressed the importance of civilian authority over the army and the necessity of maintaining existing government structures without engaging in a process of "de-Baathifcation", a lesson learned from neighbouring Iraq.

Assured that the demise of the Assad regime is forthcoming (panellists’ estimates of the regime’s lifespan ranged from a few months to one year), the report’s authors have launched a communications campaign to bring the findings of the report to activists working inside Syria, seeking endorsements from local groups to supplement the international recognition that the project has received.

But while the transitional plan has been endorsed by a number of international bodies and has received the official backing of the SNC and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, it remains largely unfamiliar to many Syrians on the ground.

The Conflict Expands

Despite their optimism for the distant future, the panellists were forced to admit that the "incremental gains the opposition made in the summer have slowed" and that the momentum of the early strikes in Aleppo and Damascus have turned into a prolonged and bloody stalemate.

Recent reports claim that the rate of Syrian army defections have "slowed to a trickle", and at least one high-level Free Syrian Army figure appears to have defected back to the regime.

The stalemate has not prevented the violence from expanding beyond Syria’s borders. Turkish armed forces attacked several Syrian government positions on Wednesday after Syrian artillery troops shelled a Turkish town, events that led to further deterioration in relations between the two countries.

Although Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stated that he has no intention of allowing the conflict to escalate any further, thousands have been protesting in the streets of Ankara and Istanbul to decry the ruling AK Party’s "ugly provocation of war" with Syria.

The conflict is also drawing other disparate groups from both sides into its orbit. After the death of a prominent member of Hizballah in Syria, some analysts are predicting a "more explicit backing for Assad" that may tie the Lebanese organisation more closely to the regime.

Within the ranks of the opposition, questions have been raised about the growing number of opposition members with ties to right wing or Zionist organisations, including the affiliation of The Day After Project’s Rami Nakhla with CyberDissidents, a group funded by Sheldon Adelson’s Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.

Envoys from both sides are also busily attempting to win new allies and legitimacy; a letter to Pope Benedict XVI from prominent opposition activist Michel Kilo requests a visit from the Pope to allay fears from Syria’s Christians that the uprising has taken a sectarian focus.

War Rages On

Meanwhile, dozens of Syrians were killed in a series of Al Qaeda-style suicide blasts in the Syrian city of Aleppo, an attack claimed by the extremist opposition group Jabhat Al-Nusra. The government has responded with mortar attacks, aerial strafing and sniper fire, reducing much of the ancient city to rubble.

Fighting in Damascus itself has ebbed significantly since the summer, although the rights organisation Human Rights Watch issued a statement today condemning the government’s abduction of prominent human rights lawyer Khalil Maatouk, who has defended Syrian activists in government courts.

"Maatouk’s apparent arbitrary and incommunicado detention would violate basic principles of international human rights law," said the statement, calling on the government to "immediately release him if he is in its custody".

The abduction has led to renewed calls from Egypt, the European Union and human rights organisations for Syria to release its thousands of jailed political prisoners. The intransigent response from Damascus will likely raise more calls for Assad’s departure at all costs.

As Syria continues to unravel and infrastructural and humanitarian responses become more critical, a plan for Syria’s future seems more important than ever. But it also casts a shadow of doubt over the viability of an abstract draft plan to rebuild Syria that sidesteps many of the same issues that have torn the country apart.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Mideast, Politics, Security Tagged With: , ,

"How Much to Lift the Sanctions?" Iranians React to MEK De-Listing

October 5, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Yasaman Baji

TEHRAN, Oct 04 (IPS) – Last week’s decision by the U.S. State Department to remove the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from its terrorism list has, as anticipated, led to charges by the Iranian government that the administration of President Barack Obama is hypocritical and using double standards.While the U.S. government has deemed the MEK’s official disavowal of violence as sufficient for removal from its terrorist list, Tehran insists the MEK has never stopped its terrorist acts inside Iranian territory.

That view is very much echoed by the general public as well.

Although MEK was part of coalition that spearheaded the downfall of the monarchy in 1979, many people continue to blame the violence and radicalism of the early years of the revolution on MEK’s decision to engage in armed resistance against the revolutionary regime.

But for the Iranian public, the group’s unsavoury, if not sinister reputation was sealed with its cooperation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).

MEK leader Massoud Rajavi’s flight from Iran to Iraq and the organisation’s military operations against Iran in the latter part of the war have created deep antipathy among the Iranian population, leading even many of those who supported the organisation in the early days of the revolution to hide or deny their previous links.

Fifty-year old Azar, who spent four years in prison in the 1980s for her support of the MEK, says that even her family shunned her after her release from prison despite her efforts to completely disassociate herself from the group.

“I was not taken to family gatherings because another family member was killed in a Mojahedin attack, and even my parents were worried that I had not given up on my ideas,” she told IPS.

The distaste for the Mojahedin is reinforced today by the widespread belief, confirmed by reports in the Western press, that it has been an instrument of the Israeli government in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. In the view of Ali, who is a merchant, “they have sold themselves and are ready to even sell their mothers to gain power.”

Government-owned media contribute to this negative image by never mentioning the name of the organisation and simply identifying its membership as monafeqin, which means hypocrites. But even without government propaganda, the iconic photo of Rajavi shaking hands with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War is sufficiently effective in sustaining MEK’s highly negative image.

Given this negative image and lack of support inside Iran, MEK’s removal from the terrorist list has puzzled many Iranians. Reza, a leftist activist in the 1980s who enlisted in the ranks of the Green Movement after the contested 2009 presidential election, thinks that the move by the United Stated is intended to further pressure Iran but worries about the impact it will have on the opposition movement.

“The reason people protested against Ahmadinejad’s election was because they were worried about their country,” he told IPS. “But if protests pave the way for a more dangerous path for the country and society involving the Mojahedin, then we prefer the current conditions.”

In addition, questions are raised for some Iranians who have always seen the United States as a progressive and democratic country. The news that many U.S. politicians have become advocates of the organisation after receiving large sums of money from MEK has shocked them. This is particularly so since most Iranians are aware of the MEK’s cult-like and undemocratic internal organisation.

“When in the U.S. you can buy a senator with money,” Maryam said during a recent debate among university students here, “then the claimed support for democracy and freedom is as much of a lie as Ahmadinejad’s utterances, and can always be changed with money.”

To this, Alireza, an economics student, added wryly, “If money is the issue, then perhaps members of the U.S. Congress can publicly announce their price to us, and we Iranians are ready to collect money and give it to them so that they would lift the economic sanctions they have imposed on us.”

A university professor, however, took a more serious tone, suggesting MEK’s removal from the list has led many activists and intellectuals to wonder why the United States, a country which prides itself on its support for democracy and human rights, has taken a step that so clearly weakens the democratic movement in Iran. To him, the removal has given the Islamic Republic “a useful enemy".

As a mutual threat, MEK’s removal, he said, “facilitates the bringing together of a society and government that have in recent years moved apart.”

This sentiment was expressed in a different way by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in his press conference this week said that the MEK removal from the terrorist list “is a cause for our happiness".

He said, “If we had to tell the world that the United States is the main supporter of terrorism and uses double standards in dealing with the issue, we would have to spend 500 million dollars – but now they have themselves done it for free.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Geopolitics, Mideast, Report Tagged With: , ,

Turkey Authorises Use of Force in Syria

October 5, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

AJ Correspondents

DOHA, Oct 04 (IPS) – Turkey’s parliament has authorised cross-border military action against Syria, if deemed necessary by the government.The mandate, valid for one year, was passed by 320 votes in the 550-seat Turkish parliament, the Anatolia news agency reported on Thursday.

Besir Atalay, one of Turkey’s deputy prime ministers, said authorising the use of force in Syria was not a declaration of war but was intended as a deterrent.

The vote came as Turkey resumed shelling Syrian government military positions on Thursday morning in retaliation for a mortar attack which landed over its border in southeastern Turkey killing five of its citizens – a woman and four children from the same family.

"The Syrian side has admitted what it did and apologised," Atalay said.

Turkish state media said that the attacks by artillery units based in the border town of Akcakale were continuing.

Several Syrian troops were killed as a result of overnight Turkish shelling at a base near the Syrian border town of Tal al-Abyad, a UK-based Syrian activist group said.

An aide to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that his country had no intention of declaring war on Syria, pointing out that the shelling – now in its second day – should be seen as a "warning" to the authorities in Damascus.

"Turkey has no interest in a war with Syria. But Turkey is capable of protecting its borders and will retaliate when necessary," Ibrahim Kalin, a senior adviser to Erdogan, said on his Twitter account.

"Political, diplomatic initiatives will continue," he said.

The parliament had already been due to vote on Thursday on extending a five-year-old authorisation for foreign military operations, an agreement originally intended to allow strikes on Kurdish bases in northern Iraq.

‘The last straw’

But the memorandum signed by Erdogan and sent to parliament overnight said that despite repeated warnings and diplomatic initiatives, the Syrian military had launched aggressive action against Turkish territory, presenting "additional risks".

"This situation has reached a level of creating a serious threat and risks to our national security. At this point the need has emerged to take the necessary measures to act promptly and swiftly against additional risks and threats," it said.

In the most serious cross-border escalation of the 18-month uprising in Syria, Turkey hit back after what it called "the last straw" when a mortar hit a residential neighbourhood of the southern border town of Akcakale on Wednesday.

Security sources said the mortar had come from near Tal al-Abyad and that Turkey was increasing the number of troops along its border.

"Our armed forces in the border region responded immediately to this abominable attack in line with their rules of engagement; targets were struck through artillery fire against places in Syria identified by radar," Erdogan’s office said in a statement late on Wednesday.

"Turkey will never leave unanswered such kinds of provocation by the Syrian regime against our national security."

Syria said it was investigating the source of the mortar bomb and urged restraint. Information Minister Omran Zoabi conveyed his condolences to the Turkish people, saying his country respected the sovereignty of neighbouring countries.

Following the attack, Bulent Arinc, another deputy prime minister, said Turkey was "not blinded by rage".

"There is definitely a response to it (the attack) in international law … We are not blinded by rage, but we will protect our rights to the end in the face of such an attack on our soil that killed our people."

Al Jazeera’s Andrew Simmons, reporting from Antakya on the Turkish-Syrian border, said Arinc’s mention of "certain responsibilities" contained within NATO treaty articles could mean that Turkey responded without consulting international bodies first.

‘Breach of peace’

NATO said it stood by member-nation Turkey and urged Syria to put an end to "flagrant violations of international law."

Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Akcakale, said that one has to ask the question of whether Syria "would want to draw Turkey into the conflict, and would Turkey want this to be the start of a larger and widening escalation of the battle regionally."

The U.S.-led Western military alliance held an urgent late night meeting in Brussels to discuss the matter.

That meeting was only the second time in NATO’s 63-year history that members had convened under Article 4 of its charter, which provides for consultations when a member state feels its territorial integrity, political independence or security is under threat.

Turkey also asked the U.N. Security Council to take the "necessary action" to stop Syrian "aggression".

In a letter to the president of the 15-nation Security Council, Ertugrul Apakan, Turkey’s U.N. ambassador, called the firing of the mortar bomb "a breach of international peace and security".

U.N. diplomats said Security Council members hoped it would issue a non-binding statement on Thursday that would condemn the mortar attack "in the strongest terms" and demand an end to violations of Turkey’s territorial sovereignty.

Members had hoped to issue the statement on Wednesday, but Russia – a staunch ally of Syria, which along with China has vetoed three U.N. resolutions condemning President Bashar al-Assad’s government – asked for a delay, diplomats said.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Geopolitics, Mideast, News Tagged With: , ,

Living in Hiding From Libyan Militias

September 27, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Mel Frykberg

TRIPOLI, Sep 27 (IPS) – Farrah Hamary looks the picture of despair as sweat trickles down his face in Tripoli’s heat and humidity. Hamary is too afraid to give his full name or to allow his picture to be taken.He shows IPS the scars criss-crossing his back, the cigarette burns on his arms, and the bones in his left hand which failed to heal properly when it was broken by Libyan militiamen.

Hamary, 39, is from Sudan’s war-torn and economically deprived region Kordofan. He came to Libya several years ago to eke out a living selling vegetables and fruit from his street stall in the Suq Al Ahad market in Tripoli’s Kasr Ben Gashir neighbourhood. His meagre earnings were sent back to his wife and child in Sudan.

Hamary now lives in fear. He has become victim of a militia brigade, (Katiba in Arabic), who control his local neighbourhood through fear, intimidation and extortion.

By day the Fatih Katiba, whose chief calls himself Izzedine, wear Libyan army fatigues. By night he and his group exchange military uniforms for civilian clothing, steal and demand protection money, predominantly from sub-Saharan Africans in the area.

Hamary came to the attention of the Fatih militia when a friend was involved in a car accident in July near Kasr Ben Gashir, and he went to help. Shortly afterwards Izzedine’s men arrived on the scene. They took Hamary back to their headquarters where he was beaten and tortured over two days though he had committed no crime.

“I was hung upside down and beaten on the soles of my feet. They beat me repeatedly with an iron bar on my back and arms until I was bleeding. I was also beaten with a chair and cigarette butts were extinguished on my arms. My hand was broken during the beating and it still hasn’t healed properly,” Hamary told IPS.

The Katiba confiscated Hamary’s passport, took his car and demanded he pay them 5,000 Libyan Dinars before they would return his passport. On his release Hamary reported the incident to the Sudanese embassy in Tripoli, which gave him a letter to take to the police. Sudanese embassy staff have themselves lost several cars to armed hijackings.

“The police were not interested and told me to leave. They are afraid of the militia who have

previously attacked the police station and stolen guns. There is no law and order in this country,” said Hamary.

The Sudanese migrant’s next step was to hire a lawyer, who went with him to see Izzedine and tell him what his men had done. “He just laughed and said ‘God be with you. You can leave now.’”

Issa Ibrahim from Darfur is among the lucky few to have got away. He escaped to Libya fleeing Khartoum’s Janjaweed militia, who have carried out a scorched earth policy at the behest of the Sudanese government. In Tripoli he opened a small clothing shop in the Al Rasheed neighbourhood to help support his wife and children back in Darfur.

“I’ve made friends with my Libyan neighbours and they look out for me if anybody starts to make trouble with me,” Ibrahim told IPS. “So far nobody has hurt me physically. They have only called me insulting names because I’m black. There are a lot of Libyans who look down on black Africans.

“But I have to take a lot of precautions. I don’t go out after 7pm because the streets are dangerous, especially if you are black and foreign. I also avoid certain neighbourhoods and some cities such as Misrata I would never go anywhere near.”

During the revolution former dictator Muammar Gaddafi hired African mercenaries to fight the rebels. A significant number of black Libyans, particularly those from the town of Tawergha near Misrata, sided with Gaddafi and are alleged to have committed atrocities against the civilian population of Misrata.

Libya has long attracted migrants from neighbouring countries and other parts of the world seeking economic opportunities unavailable to them in their home countries, or using it as a transit point to Europe.

Under Gaddafi, Libya, with a small population and rich oil reserves, relied heavily on hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers to prop up the economy. Many of the migrants managed to escape during the civil war, but others chose to take their chance in Libya because conditions in some of their homelands were even more dire.

“The situation in the country has not yet stabilised and there is no central power capable of governing of the whole territory,” the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in conjunction with the NGO Migreurop reported in June after visiting a number of migrant camps in Libya.

“So armed militia groups and individuals have taken it upon themselves to decide on the treatment of migrants, outside of any legal framework. The militias control, arrest and detain migrants in improvised retention/detention camps. Invoking security concerns to justify the ‘clean-up of illegals’, they hunt migrants down, with sub-Saharan Africans as their prime targets.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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Qatar: Rich and Dangerous

September 25, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online | Oilprice.com

By Felix Imonti for Oilprice.com

The first concern of the Emir of Qatar is the prosperity and security of the tiny kingdom. To achieve that, he knows no limits.

Stuck between Iran and Saudi Arabia is Qatar with the third largest natural gas deposit in the world. The gas gives the nearly quarter of a million Qatari citizens the highest per capita income on the planet and provides 70 percent of government revenue.

How does an extremely wealthy midget with two potentially dangerous neighbors keep them from making an unwelcomed visit? Naturally, you have someone bigger and tougher to protect you.

Of course, nothing is free. The price has been to allow the United States to have two military bases in a strategic location. According to Wikileak diplomatic cables, the Qataris are even paying sixty percent of the costs.

Having tanks and bunker busting bombs nearby will discourage military aggression, but it does nothing to curb the social tumult that has been bubbling for decades in the Middle Eastern societies. Eighty-four years ago, the Moslem Brotherhood arose in Egypt because of the presence of foreign domination by Great Britain and the discontent of millions of the teaming masses yearning to be free. Eighty-four years later, the teaming masses are still yearning.

Sixty-five percent of the people in the Middle East are under twenty-nine years of age. It is this desperate angry group that presents a danger that armies cannot stop. The cry for their dignity, "I am a man," is the sound that sends terror through governments. It is this overwhelming force that the Emir of Qatar has been able to deflect.

A year after he deposed his father in 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani established the Al-Jazeera television satellite news network. He invited some of the radical Salafi preachers that had been given sanctuary in Qatar to address the one and a half billion Moslems around the world. They had their electronic soapbox and the card to an ATM, but there was a price.

The price was silence. They could speak to the world and arouse the fury in Egypt or Libya, but they would have to leave their revolution outside of Qatar or the microphone would be switched off and the ATM would stop dispensing the good life.

The Moslem Brotherhood, that is a major force across the region, dissolved itself in Qatar in 1999. Jasim Sultan, a member of the former organization, explained that the kingdom was in compliance with Islamic law. He heads the state funded Awaken Project that publishes moderate political and philosophical literature.

How Qatar has benefited from networking with the Salafis is illustrated by the connections with Tunisia where Qatar is making a large investment in telecommunications. Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafiq Abdulsalaam was head of the Research and Studies Division in the Al Jazeera Centre in Doha. His father-in-law Al Ghanouchi is the head of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood party.

Over much of the time since he seized power, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani has followed the policy of personal networking, being proactive in business and neutral on the international stage. The Emir is generous with the grateful, the Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund bargains hard in the board room and the kingdom makes available Qatar’s Good Offices to resolve disputes.

Qatar’s foreign policy made an abrupt shift when the kingdom entered the war against Qaddafi. The kingdom sent aircraft to join NATO forces. On the ground, Qatari special forces armed, trained, and led Libyans against Qaddafi’s troops.

The head of the National Transition Council Mustafa Abdul Jalil attributed much of the success of the revolution to the efforts of Qatar that he said had spent two billion dollars. He commented, "Nobody traveled to Qatar without being given a sum of money by the government."

Qatar had ten billion dollars in investments in Libya to protect. The Barwa Real Estate Company alone had two billion committed to the construction of a beach resort near Tripoli.

While the bullets were still flying, Qatar signed eight billion dollars in agreements with the NTC. Just in case things with the NTC didn’t work out, they financed rivals Abdel Hakim Belhaj, leader of the February 17 Martyr’s Brigade, and Sheik Ali Salabi, a radical cleric who had been exiled in Doha.

If Qatar’s investments of ten billion dollars seem substantial, the future has far more to offer. Reconstruction costs are estimated at seven hundred billion dollars. The Chinese and Russians had left behind between them thirty billion in incomplete contracts and investments and all of it is there for the taking for those who aided the revolution.

No sooner had Qaddafi been caught and shot, Qatar approached Bashar Al-Assad to establish a transitional government with the Moslem Brotherhood. As you would expect, relinquishing power to the Brotherhood was an offer that he could refuse. It didn’t take long before he heard his sentence pronounced in January 2012 on the CBS television program, 60 Minutes by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.

The Emir declared that foreign troops should be sent into Syria. At the Friends of Syria conference in February, Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said, "We should do whatever necessary to help [the Syrian opposition], including giving them weapons to defend themselves."

Why would Qatar want to become involved in Syria where they have little invested? A map reveals that the kingdom is a geographic prisoner in a small enclave on the Persian Gulf coast.

It relies upon the export of LNG, because it is restricted by Saudi Arabia from building pipelines to distant markets. In 2009, the proposal of a pipeline to Europe through Saudi Arabia and Turkey to the Nabucco pipeline was considered, but Saudi Arabia that is angered by its smaller and much louder brother has blocked any overland expansion.

Already the largest LNG producer, Qatar will not increase the production of LNG. The market is becoming glutted with eight new facilities in Australia coming online between 2014 and 2020.

A saturated North American gas market and a far more competitive Asian market leaves only Europe. The discovery in 2009 of a new gas field near Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Syria opened new possibilities to bypass the Saudi Barrier and to secure a new source of income. Pipelines are in place already in Turkey to receive the gas. Only Al-Assad is in the way.

Qatar along with the Turks would like to remove Al-Assad and install the Syrian chapter of the Moslem Brotherhood. It is the best organized political movement in the chaotic society and can block Saudi Arabia’s efforts to install a more fanatical Wahhabi based regime. Once the Brotherhood is in power, the Emir’s broad connections with Brotherhood groups throughout the region should make it easy for him to find a friendly ear and an open hand in Damascus.

A control centre has been established in the Turkish city of Adana near the Syrian border to direct the rebels against Al-Assad. Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Saud asked to have the Turks establish a joint Turkish, Saudi, Qatari operations center. "The Turks liked the idea of having the base in Adana so that they could supervise its operations" a source in the Gulf told Reuters.

The fighting is likely to continue for many more months, but Qatar is in for the long term. At the end, there will be contracts for the massive reconstruction and there will be the development of the gas fields. In any case, Al-Assad must go. There is nothing personal; it is strictly business to preserve the future tranquility and well-being of Qatar.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Qatar-Rich-and-Dangerous.html

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Iranian Diplomat Says Iran Offered Deal to Halt 20-Percent Enrichment

September 24, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Sep 24 (IPS) – Iran has again offered to halt its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, which the United States has identified as its highest priority in the nuclear talks, in return for easing sanctions against Iran, according to Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).Ali Asghar Soltanieh, who has conducted Iran’s negotiations with the IAEA in Tehran and Vienna, revealed in an interview with IPS that Iran had made the offer at the meeting between EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s leading nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Istanbul Sep. 19.

Soltanieh also revealed in the interview that IAEA officials had agreed last month to an Iranian demand that it be provided documents on the alleged Iranian activities related to nuclear weapons which Iran is being asked to explain, but that the concession had then been withdrawn.

“We are prepared to suspend enrichment to 20 percent, provided we find a reciprocal step compatible with it,” Soltanieh said, adding, “We said this in Istanbul.”

Soltanieh is the first Iranian official to go on record as saying Iran has proposed a deal that would end its 20-percent enrichment entirely, although it had been reported previously.

“If we do that,” Soltanieh said, “there shouldn’t be sanctions.”

Iran’s position in the two rounds of negotiations with the P5+1 – China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, the United States and Germany – earlier this year was reported to have been that a significant easing of sanctions must be part of the bargain.

The United States and its allies in the P5+1 ruled out such a deal in the two rounds of negotiations in Istanbul and in Baghdad in May and June, demanding that Iran not only halt its enrichment to 20 percent but ship its entire stockpile of uranium enriched to that level out of the country and close down the Fordow enrichment facility entirely.

Even if Iran agreed to those far-reaching concessions the P5+1 nations offered no relief from sanctions.

Soltanieh repeated the past Iranian rejection of any deal involving the closure of Fordow.

“It’s impossible if they expect us to close Fordow,” Soltanieh said.

The U.S. justification for the demand for the closure of Fordow has been that it has been used for enriching uranium to the 20-percent level, which makes it much easier for Iran to continue enrichment to weapons grade levels.

But Soltanieh pointed to the conversion of half the stockpile to fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, which was documented in the Aug. 30 IAEA report.

“The most important thing in the (IAEA) report,” Soltanieh said, was “a great percentage of 20-percent enriched uranium already converted to powder for the Tehran Research Reactor.”

That conversion to powder for fuel plates makes the uranium unavailable for reconversion to a form that could be enriched to weapons grade level.

Soltanieh suggested that the Iranian demonstration of the technical capability for such conversion, which apparently took the United States and other P5+1 governments by surprise, has rendered irrelevant the P5+1 demand to ship the entire stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium out of the country.

“This capacity shows that we don’t need fuel from other countries,” said Soltanieh.

Iran began enriching uranium to 20 percent in 2010 after the United States made a virtually non-negotiable offer in 2009 to provide fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor in return for Iran’s shipping three-fourths of its low-enriched uranium stockpile out of the country and waiting for two years for the fuel plates.

The P5+1 demand for closure of the Fordow enrichment plant was also apparently based on the premise the facility was built exclusively for 20-percent enrichment. But Iran has officially informed the IAEA that it is for both enrichment to 20 percent and enrichment to 3.5 percent.

The 1,444 centrifuges installed at Fordow between March and August – but not connected to pipes, according to the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security – could be used for either 20-percent enrichment or 3.5-percent enrichment, giving Iran additional leverage in future negotiations.

Soltanieh revealed that two senior IAEA officials had accepted a key Iranian demand in the most recent negotiating session last month on a “structured agreement” on Iranian cooperation on allegations of “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear programme – only to withdraw the concession at the end of the meeting.

The issue was Iran’s insistence on being given all the documents on which the IAEA bases the allegations of Iranian research related to nuclear weapons which Iran is expected to explain to the IAEA’s satisfaction.

The Feb. 20 negotiating text shows that the IAEA sought to evade any requirement for sharing any such documents by qualifying the commitment with the phrase “where appropriate”.

At the most recent meeting on Aug. 24, however, the IAEA negotiators, Deputy Director General for Safeguards Herman Nackaerts and Assistant Director General for Policy Rafael Grossi, agreed for the first time to a commitment to “deliver the documents related to activities claimed to have been conducted by Iran”, according to Soltanieh.

At the end of the meeting, however, Nackaerts and Grossi “put this language in brackets”, thus leaving it unresolved, Soltanieh said.

Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei recalls in his 2011 memoirs that he had “constantly pressed the source of the information” on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research – meaning the United States – “to allow us to share copies with Iran". He writes that he asked how he could “accuse a person without revealing the accusations against him?”

ElBaradei also says Israel gave the IAEA a whole new set of documents in late summer 2009 “purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapons studies until at least 2007".

Soltanieh confirmed that the other unresolved issue is whether the IAEA investigation will be open-ended or not.

The Feb. 20 negotiating text showed that Iran demanded a discrete list of topics to which the IAEA inquiry would be limited and a requirement that each topic would be considered “concluded” once Iran had answered the questions and delivered the information requested.

But the IAEA insisted on being able to “return” to topics that had been “discussed earlier”, according to the February negotiating text.

That position remains unchanged, according to Soltanieh. The Iranian ambassador quoted an IAEA negotiator as asking, “What if next month we receive something else — some additional information?’”.

“If the IAEA had its way,” Soltanieh said, “It would be another 10 or 20 years.”

Soltanieh told IPS a meeting between Iran and the IAEA set for mid-October had been agreed before the IAEA Board of Governors earlier this month with Nackaerts and Grossi.

The Iranian ambassador said the IAEA officials had promised him that Director General Yukia Amano would announce the meeting during the Board meeting, but Amano made no such announcement.

Instead, after a meeting with Fereydoun Abbasi, Iran’s Vice President and head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Amano only referred to the “readiness of Agency negotiators to meet with Iran in the near future."

“He didn’t keep the promise,” said Soltanieh, adding that Iran would have to “study in the capital” how to respond.

Soltanieh elaborated on Abassi’s suggestion last week that the sabotage of power to the Fordow facility the night before an IAEA request for a snap inspection of the facility showed the agency could be infiltrated by “terrorists and saboteurs”.

“The objection we have is that the DG isn’t protecting confidential information,” said Soltanieh. “When they have information on how many centrifuges are working and how many are not working (in IAEA reports), this is a very serious concern.”

Iran has complained for years about information gathered by IAEA inspectors, including data on personnel in the Iranian nuclear programme, being made available to U.S., Israeli and European intelligence agencies.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

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Assad and Opposition Both Losing

September 23, 2012 by

Global Analyst Online / IPS

Zak Brophy

ALEPPO, Syria, Sep 23 (IPS) – Two floors have been ripped from the top of an apartment block in Aleppo in northern Syria. A lone man stands amidst the rubble four stories up after a missile from one of his own government’s fighter jets smashed into the building that morning. With his arms crossed, the solitary figure surveys the destruction around him.Down below by the building’s fallen debris a group of around a dozen men are having a heated argument. “The FSA has put itself among us and the regime’s forces are shelling them. Why should we die for this,” cries one of the men. “For a year and a half we managed to live in peace and then along came the FSA and now our neighbourhood has been destroyed.”

The battle for the control of Aleppo between the Free Syrian Army, or FSA, and the forces of President Basher al-Assad’s regime erupted in earnest just over two months ago, and the opposition now control almost two-thirds of the city. While the government’s forces have been unable to wrest back control, amounting to a serious blow to morale, they have unleashed a relentless campaign of aerial bombardment from planes, helicopters and artillery to try and crush the rebel uprising.

That the battleground is a densely populated city means the homes, factories, schools and hospitals of ordinary citizens are also getting destroyed; no one knows how many hundreds have been killed. More than 200,000 have fled.

It may be true that the Assad regime’s own bombs have crushed whatever legitimacy it had in these quarters, but the FSA is also often viewed as an unwelcome intruder. “People are starting to blame us. There is great pressure on us to finish this quickly,” says Abdul Fader, an Islamic scholar from Aleppo and brigade leader of around 150 FSA fighters.

In the neighbouring district Sharaiyeh a whole block has been laid to waste by air strikes, and is unnervingly quiet. A truck is buried under rubble, a fallen electricity pylon dissects the street, and the incessant sound of water falling from a burst tank on a roof cuts through the silence.

“I came here this morning to find this. There is nothing more I can say,” snaps a trader as he shovels up lentils from the floor of his destroyed store. He has no words, and spares no attention for the two armed FSA men standing nearby.

“Undoubtedly most people welcome and support us but it is true many don’t want us here,” says FSA fighter Khalil. “They just want to eat, drink and sleep. They don’t understand the battle we are fighting against this dictatorship.” Like many of the combatants, perhaps even most, Khalil is from outside of Aleppo, and is frustrated by the mixed reception he gets.

The fight for the city that used to be the trade and manufacturing workhorse of the Syrian economy has its roots in months of battles throughout the country to the north. FSA fighters have taken control of the region all the way from the Turkish border to Aleppo’s fringes; village by village and town by town.

Support for the fighters in these impoverished and almost exclusively Sunni Muslim areas is much more conspicuous. Many of the fighters hail from the region’s villages. However, that endorsement has been harder to secure as the fighters descended into the more urbane, prosperous and multi-confessional city.

The title FSA implies that there is a unified military force in the city, but the reality is far more chaotic. While the coordination of more localised fighting units was successful in the campaigns throughout the countryside, the fragmentation within the city is not only undermining the FSA’s ability to fight the regime but is also adding to an atmosphere of lawlessness and disorder.

At a base for around 200 FSA fighters, the brigade’s leader receives some residents from an adjacent neighbourhood. “A young man, one of our relatives, has been arrested or perhaps even kidnapped at a checkpoint. We believe it was controlled by your men,” they plead. The leader wishes them the best of luck but apologises and has to concede that the checkpoint they are referring to is in an area not under his control. The men leave with a handshake but their frustration, perhaps even contempt, is palpable.

Kidnapping, extortion and looting by thugs and criminals among the ranks of the armed opposition draws scorn from other FSA fighters, but amidst the turmoil in which Aleppo is engulfed there is little they can do. “There are some that commit these crimes, we try to arrest and detain them but this is a revolution and there is chaos,” says Abu Fares, media coordinator with the FSA.

The FSA in Aleppo is trying to build a more unified leadership and command structure, most notably by uniting the largest fighting forces including the Union military Council, the al-Tawheed brigade, al-Fateh brigade and Soqour Shahbaa brigade under The Revolutionary Military Council. On the ground, however, there are still dispersed rag tag elements to the fighting force.

“The problem is that many of the fighters come from different provinces and don’t know each other. If we could achieve even 50 percent unity then I will be very happy,” says FSA brigade leader Abdul Fader.

Then there is the patently sectarian and Islamist leanings of some of the forces. A police car passing the hospital flying a large al-Qaeda flag and blaring out loud recitations of the Quran curries favour with some but not with many. Even among the Syrian FSA fighters the presence on the front lines of small groups of battle-hardened mujahedeen from countries such as Libya is a divisive reality.

The terror raining down from the Syrian air force on most of Aleppo may unify the people in their loathing for the Assad regime, but it does not necessarily unite them in support of the FSA. The longer the battle in Aleppo is drawn out the more problems the FSA will have ensuring the support of the local population under their control.

As the death toll mounts, the war economy ossifies and the hoodlums establish a foothold in the city, the legitimacy of the fighters will be further diminished.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

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